HOLISTIC NEW ENGLAND
SPRING/SUMMER2021
Stepping Into Nature Early Spring Biodynamic Cooking D The Consequences of Human Plunder D Project Drawdown: 100 Climate Solutions in Real Time D Hello…My Name is Earth D Dowsing for the Spirit of Place D Ideas for Getting Your Kids into Nature D I Spy With My Eagle Eye How the Wisdom of Mentors Guided My Steps into Nature
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REWARDS & RECOGNITION
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MAIN OFFICE PO Box 405, Uxbridge, MA 01569 Phone: 508-278-9640 Fax: 508-278-9641 www.spiritofchange.org
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ADVERTISING INFORMATION Phone: 508-278-9640 x 5 E-mail: advertise@spiritofchange.org PUBLISHER & EDITOR Carol Bedrosian Phone: 508-278-9640 x 3 E-mail: carol@spiritofchange.org ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Wendy Watkins Phone: 508-278-9640 x 5
Departments Features
Email: wendy@spiritofchange.org WEB EDITOR
Spring/Summer 2021 • Vol. 34, No. 144
Nicole Melone Email: nicole@spiritofchange.org CONTRIBUTING COLUMNISTS Eric Linter, Astrology DESIGN & PRODUCTION Samantha Angeli
Departments
Features
Musings
by Carol Bedrosian.................................. 8
Early Spring Biodynamic Cooking by Anne-Marie Fryer Wiboltt..................................................... 14
Protect Holistic Healthcare in Massachusetts
Hello…My Name Is Earth.......................................................................18
Amber Routten-Mitchell
by Carol Bedrosian.................................. 9
Wendy Watkins
Starspeak
PRINTING GDI, Inc, Hanover, MA
by Eric Linter........................................... 10
Journal of Natural Healing: Learning To Listen
Project Drawdown: 100 Climate Solutions in Real Time by Cher Gilmore............................................................................ 30 5G: Environmental Health Threat, Economic Boon, or Both? By Katie Alvord..............................................................................32
Directories
Vivaxis: The Axis of Life by Patricia Burke.....................................33
Calendar............................................ 54 Holistic Logo Directory...................56 Copyright ©2021 Spirit of Change. All Rights Reserved. Spirit of Change distributes 40,000 magazines throughout New England semi-annually (Fall and Spring) and accepts paid advertising as an advertising service. Responsibility for the products, services or claims of our advertisers rests solely with them; advertisers are liable for any claims made against Spirit of Change Magazine as a result of their advertisement. The information in Spirit of Change is intended as a sharing of knowledge about holistic health for educational purposes. Health care decisions requiring medical advice should be made with the help of your health care professional. Subscriptions are $20.00/4 issues. Article and artwork submissions are accepted for review and will only be returned if accompanied by a SASE. To receive bulk shipments of Spirit of Change to distribute to your clients & customers, please email carol@ spiritofchange.org.
The Consequences of Human Plunder: Interview with Eileen Crist by Leath Tonino...................................................... 20
by Vir McCoy........................................... 16
Yoga Guide.........................................47
Online at: SpiritOfChange.org
52
Advertiser Index...............................62 Holistic Specialties Directory........63 Classifieds.........................................63
Dowsing for the Spirit of Place: Interview with Sig Lonegren by Susan Meeker-Lowry..............................................................35 How the Wisdom of Mentors Guided My Steps into Nature by Sharon Powers..........................................................................38 The Herbal Journey Continues: 15th International Herb Symposium by Susan Leopold........................................ 41 Stepping Into Nature .......................................................................... 42 Beautiful Distractions by Heather Peters; Ideas for Getting Your Kids Into Nature by Danielle Cohen; The Sky is Falling, the Sky is Falling! by Maureen St. Germain; Awakening to the Gift of a Flower Garden by Carolyn McGee; Nature and Me by Sarah Fuhro Come and Sit With Us: A Lady Slipper Love Story by Julie Rost................................................................................... 48
Cover Art
Northern Lights by Tatyana Gogolkina www.etsy/shop/ArtTGogolkina
6 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
I Spy With My Eagle Eye by Trish Whynot.....................................52
FALL/WINTER
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SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 7
MUSINGS
BY CAROL BEDROSIAN
Remotely Possible
A
year ago, last spring, many populations around the world faced grave unknowns as we entered an unprecedented period of global pandemic lockdown. Confined to our homes except for masked grocery store excursions, emergencies or other necessities, and plagued with conflicting sources of reliable information, pervasive fear and anxiety easily rooted in our lives. Would we survive a virus outbreak? How long would lockdown last? What would happen to our lives and livelihoods without being able to engage with the world? Sounds like some dreadful futurist novel plot, but this spring — perhaps not so unlike our outdoor mammal cousins — we find ourselves cautiously emerging from our strange year-long hibernation at home. Some of us have lost loved ones or careers or financial sol8 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
vency, while others have faced the torment of depression and suicidal thoughts for the first time in their lives. Despite the many hardships the lockdown imposed in being cut off from family, friends, familiar routines and cherished traditions, as well as its devastating economic impact, in return, it has provided significant new perspectives in our lives. As indoor pandemic restrictions tightened last spring, people flocked to the outdoors for space, for healing, for freedom. In a world where you could no longer reliably presume what tomorrow might bring, a simple walk outdoors still made sense. Indoor activities were quickly adapted so outdoor dining, learning, shopping and entertainment could take place to a limited extent. Suddenly, our perception of nature’s vital role in our lives had been sharpened. Not only does indoor quarantining make us more appreciative of our essential need for fresh air, green plants and sunshine, but also shows us how vulnerable we are to the much greater forces of nature, as climate takes on greater significance in our lives. We wonder where the virus came from — nature or man-made? Perhaps it’s some of both. Evidence suggests that the COVID virus could have been deposited at our genetic doorstep as a natural consequence of humans overstepping our territorial boundaries, and increasingly coming into contact with other species’ DNA. Our insatiable desire to consume and develop new land and waterways for profitable use has turned our species into invasive super killers, inserting our footprint where it should not be, and wiping out hundreds of other species daily in the process. According to author and Virginia Tech professor Eileen Crist interviewed in this issue beginning on page 20, “If we keep going as we’re going, we will likely lose 50 percent or more of the planet’s species in this century…The killing of wildlife is so profound that scientists have coined the term defaunation to capture it. We’re emptying out the planet.” While the pandemic has brought us outside into nature more often, the sloweddown pace of quarantine life has also given us space for inner reflection and transformation that would have been all but impossible pre-pandemic, simply because we were too busy. Over the past year we have witnessed powerful actions for social justice and racial equality, millions marching in the streets, and an increasing awareness of climate change as the most critical threat of our time. Much of this was due to the pandemic’s launch of a new web of virtual learning, social networks and meeting platforms created with amazing speed by businesses, governments, churches, schools and entertainment venues to continue sharing their services remotely. Many have seen memberships and business boom. Even mainstream medicine went virtual very quickly with insurance-reimbursible services, as patients and insurers discovered that many health concerns could be addressed much more easily and inexpensively that way. The transition to providing more remote learning and healing sessions has especially benefitted alternative medicine, which has long offered many remote healing modalities. These mental and energetic healing techniques work no matter where the practitioner and client are situated. Even some modalities that previously relied on in-person sessions have discovered that their techniques are adaptable for remote use. This means more patients can access services, and more people can learn how to provide these healing benefits to themselves and others. Now is the time — when you have the time and transformation is in the air — to invest in learning how to heal yourself. I see a connection between the discovery that we can conduct much more of our lives and business remotely than we ever thought possible, and the adoption of many new forms of remote healing in the future of healthcare. Quantum physics tells us we are not solid, but vibrating energy particles, even though we don’t experience ourselves that way. The power to manipulate and balance the energies within your body to heal is yours to claim as soon as you believe it is possible and start practicing. Unfortunately, efforts to license energy and other alternative practitioners at the state and local levels, despite no claims of harm, malpractice or fraud against these professionals, have begun again with the start of the new 2021-2022 legislative session. For generations, or perhaps even centuries, holistic practitioners have shared their healing skills with family, friends and clients without government oversight and the collection of licensing fees. Why start now? Ironically, but understandably, one recent licensing bill draft encouraged remote healers to get certified in the in-person version of their modality, since it was impossible to license what could not be defined. Please see the next page for actions you can take to keep holistic health vibrant and accessible to all in Massachusetts. Carol Bedrosian is the publisher of Spirit of Change Magazine. www.spiritofchange.org.
Protect Holistic Healthcare in Massachusetts Holistic healthcare is once again threatened in Massachusetts. There are two bills in development at the State House that need your attention.
SUPPORT SAFE HARBOR Beginning in 2018, Health Freedom Action Massachusetts (HFAMA) developed and secured sponsors for safe harbor legislation. Newly refiled in 2021, SD.1085/ HD.1169 — An Act Providing for Consumer Access and the Right to Practice Complementary and Alternative Health Care Services — seeks to protect unlicensed holistic healthcare professionals who agree to both provide commonsense disclosures to their clients and to refrain from prohibited acts (providing a medical diagnosis, puncturing the skin, etc.). Over the past 2 years, the legislation drafted by HFAMA had successfully made its way to the last step before a floor vote when the pandemic shut down normal business operations, and the 2-year legislative session ended without resolution on the bill. Efforts have begun again with the legislative session that began January 1, 2021. The bill currently has sponsors in both the House and the Senate, and is well-positioned for success. However, it will still take considerable effort and the support of holistic practitioners and consumers across the state to achieve passage in this new legislative session. To stay informed of activity on this bill or to volunteer to assist in the efforts for passage, please contact Spirit of Change publisher Carol Bedrosian at carol@spiritofchange.org.
OPPOSE LICENSING Despite strong opposition, the Attorney General is redrafting and refiling S168, An Act Regulating Bodyworks. Now known as SD.1068/HD.1708, the bill seeks to control and license holistic energy practitioners. Similar bills are also in process and likely to be filed at the State House soon. These laws can impact all holistic energy practitioners and teachers including Reiki, Qigong, Jin Shin Jyutsu, Tai Chi and more, burdening these safe, traditional healing art forms with unnecessary and restrictive standards. Holistic healthcare professionals would have to be certified and receive additional education for a fee to become eligible for licensure. This would force many healers who have been safely practicing for decades to close their doors and abandon patients in need. The unnecessary and restrictive standards would: 1. Increase holistic healthcare costs 2. Drive holistic health practitioners out of business 3. Decrease the availability of holistic healthcare modalities 4. Hurt part-time professionals disproportionately, especially women 5. Overstep regulatory norms by requiring licensing of non-harming holistic professions To stay informed of activity on this bill or to assist in the efforts for opposition, please contact Rita Glassman, Executive Director, MA Coalition of Holistic Practitioners at MACHH7@GMAIL.COM.
ACTION REQUIRED
It is vitally important that you register your position on these bills with your state senator and your representative. Find them here at this link: https://malegislature.gov/search/findmylegislator
1. Encourage your legislators to co-sponsor SD.1085/HD.1169 2. Encourage your legislators to oppose SD.1068/HD.1708 and other costly, unnecessary licensing of non-harming modalities
PLEASE CALL OR WRITE YOUR LEGISLATOR TODAY TO MAKE YOUR POSITION KNOWN. www.spiritofchange.org www.spiritofchange.org
SPRING/SUMMER SPRING/SUMMER2021 2021| |Spirit Spiritof ofChange Change 9 9
STARSPEAK
BY ERIC D. LINTER
Astrological Forecast
Spring/Summer 2021 “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
S
— James Sherman
pring, the season of bright hopes is near. The planets overhead hold the promise of a new paradigm. Our forecast begins with Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter joined together in visionary Aquarius. This is the sign of people power, community and friendship. Looking out for one’s fellow men and women is a fashionable necessity. The path ahead is not without challenges. Saturn spends much of 2021 in a testing square with eccentric Uranus. Cautious Saturn favors tradition and known quantities. Uranus, on the other hand, is wildly adventurous, a rule breaker open to experimentation. Both our day-to-day personal experiences as well as collective progress may feel like a case of two steps forward and one step back. Because Uranus is also associated with freedom and naturally leans towards progressive thinking, reformers and inventors can at times appear to have seized control. It was discovered in 1781, the era of the American Revolution and birth of the Industrial Age. The promise of humankind’s inventive spirit seemed limitless. First water and then steam power were harnessed to conquer Mother Nature and boost productivity. Two-hundred-and-forty years later many folks question whether we have in fact been misguided by our technological prowess. Mankind’s balance with the natural world has been lost. Faces glued to mobile phones, people are often oblivious to the person sitting right next to them while the fragility of Earth is too often an afterthought. These quality-of-life issues need to be addressed if we hope to improve our prospects on this planet. We’ll have numerous chances to speak up and act in 2021.
MARCH
Momentum is notable on the first day of the new month. The Libra Moon, a beacon of good manners and refined tastes, is agreeably aligned with Saturn, Mercury and Jupiter. We know what to do and when to do it. Partnerships thrive and teamwork is super productive. Positive trends continue. A midweek sextile between Venus and Uranus fosters affection. On Thursday, the 4th mental Mercury forms an optimistic conjunction with Jupiter. Both travel and communications go well. On Friday, the 5th the last quarter Sagittarius Moon could bring forth emotionally charged issues. The Aquarius Moon activates a tense square between Saturn and Uranus. Take 10 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
changes in stride. Many folks are confronted with difficult choices. An Aquarian stellium lights the way through storms and, by the end of the working week, renews faith in humankind. Exercise the potential of positive thinking and look for silver linings. Before dawn on Saturday, the 13th the final new moon of the zodiacal year showcases a brilliant stellium in Pisces. Composed of the Sun, Moon, Venus and Neptune, magic is afoot. All that begins during the coming two weeks is infused with both heart and vision. Women’s causes are well-served, as are creative and humanitarian endeavors. At times it will be better to follow your passion than listen to your rational mind. Don’t forget to set your clocks ahead Saturday night. Daylight Savings Time begins on Sunday. Mercury arrives in Pisces the evening of Monday, the 15th. Minds become more impressionable and fanciful. The Sun and Venus form empowering sextiles to dogged Pluto during the mid-week period. Tenacity and cooperation pay dividends on the 16th and 18th, when the supportive aspects reach peak intensity. As the ensuing weekend gets under way the Sun enters Aries before dawn on Saturday the 20th. This is the Spring Equinox, when the hours of daylight and darkness are in balance. On the threshold of the new season the future calls. Many folks feel impelled to be on their way, eager to meet new challenges. The waxing Moon reaches her first quarter stage on Sunday. The morning hours may feel slightly off kilter but things smooth out and move briskly the second half of the day. Numerous challenges arise on Tuesday, the 23rd and
Wednesday, the 24th. Flexibility and patience are helpful. The approaching conjunction of the Aries Sun and Venus, exact early Friday morning of the 26th, proves love is a guiding light. The waxing Moon crescendos to fullness on Sunday, the 28th. Full in Libra, the Moon is in opposition to the Sun and Venus. The Moon is also part of a grand trine along with Saturn and Mars. The energies are a fabulous harbinger of healing and less fearful times.
APRIL
Minutes after midnight on Thursday, the 1st, the Moon enters adventure-loving Sagittarius. Intelligent jests and jokes are recommended this April Fool’s Day. Aside from the silliness, the stars give a solid green light for important business, meetings and other commitments. The skies are relatively quiet during the first weekend of April, although some strain is felt around Sunday morning’s early last quarter Moon in Capricorn. Easter celebrations grow sweeter as the day progresses. Tuesday, the 6th is a standout day for fun. Venus and the Aries Sun are conjunct, while also harmonizing with Mars. The Aquarius Moon joins the party late in the day, setting the stage for enjoyable get togethers. Don’t forget to wear your mask and practice social distancing. Later in the week Mars forms a difficult square with Neptune. Exact the afternoon of Friday, the 9th, the aspect raises risk factors. Be conscious of the weather, potentially spoiled food and other toxic substances. Gas and water leaks, as well as simple oversights are also more likely. Improved trends dominate low key Saturday, the 10th. The Aries new Moon is exact Sunday night, the 11th. A new achievement cycle begins, but with Venus, the Sun and Moon in testing angles with Pluto, careful planning and cooperation are necessities. Follow common sense rules and regulations. Make sure partners are informed and agree with your plans. Good progress is made through the 15th but if anything is amiss, it will likely come to light on Friday, the 16th when the Sun squares Pluto. The active stars of the 17th mirror a beehive of activity down here on Earth. Springtime energy is definitely in the air. The upbeat atmosphere is a plus for chores, traveling, studying and assorted adventures. Even Mercury’s late afternoon square with Pluto can be put to good use, doing research or negotiating contracts. The Sun enters Taurus on Monday afternoon, the 19th. The pace of life eases. Sleep may be elusive that night as the Leo Moon reaches her first quarter phase. A stressful Tuesday follows. Minimize frustrations by toning down expectations. Breathe, stay calm and pace yourself. Earth Day, April 22nd, is exciting. Appropriately, the Moon is in the earth sign Virgo. Lunar aspects are inspiring. Venus forms a conjunction with Uranus, an omen of universal peace and harmony. Even a love at first sight meeting is possible. Plant a tree and fall in love! What could be better? Mercury overtakes Uranus during the early morning hours of Saturday, the 24th. Social, spiritual and technological boundaries may be redrawn. Talk with friends. Sobering news arrives late Saturday night. Under the cover of the waxing Moon a Sunday evening Mercury/Venus conjunction reminds us of our blessings. Late on Monday, the 26th the Moon is full. This is the Scorpio full Moon, at which time India celebrates the sacred Wesak festival and the spirit of Buddha is said to return to Earth’s plane. Uranus is the closest planet to the Sun, indicating this is a particularly favorable time for enlightening experiences. Less spiritually oriented souls may be in for a wakeup call. Continued on page 12
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SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 11
The days following the full Moon are comparatively mellow but the month ends dramatically. On Friday, the 30th the Sun conjuncts Uranus. Sudden changes of fortune or circumstance may catch unsuspecting souls off guard. What topples now is meant to go. In time it will be apparent that the emerging new reality is preferable to what has been lost.
MAY
We’re off to a sweet start as May arrives with an uninterrupted series of agreeable aspects. May Day harmony is a highlight. This day truly is a feel-good story. Maypole dancers are inspired! On Sunday, May 2nd more good vibes come flooding in as Mercury trines Pluto and Venus sextiles Neptune. Investigators and shoppers find what they’re looking for. People see eye-to-eye. Lovers and dreamers dream true. Monday, the 3rd ushers in more challenging energies. The Taurus Sun and Aquarius Moon both set off the square between Saturn and Uranus, creating a tense, unstable atmosphere. People who thrive on certainty find the going particularly tough. If ever there was a time to practice a “live and let live” philosophy, this is it. Respect what is. Many laws and regulations exist for good reason. Rules that don’t make sense are likely to be broken today. Mellower trends hold sway as the Moon wanes. On Saturday, the 8th it’s smart to avoid overdoing in any way. Venus enters Gemini late that night, a good placement for people who enjoy socializing. Mother’s Day, the 9th, has its ups and downs. The first half of the day holds a number of potentially uneasy moments. Defer to Mom and you can’t go wrong. Moods improve during the afternoon hours. The waning Moon and Mars give Monday, the 10th an energy boost but it’s also a good night for turning in early. The Taurus new Moon launches the next activity cycle on Tuesday, the 11th. With Mars and Uranus in a favorable sextile, progress promises to be swift during the coming weeks. Wednesday, the 12th is quietly fruitful. Jupiter enters Pisces Wednesday evening, a fine omen for those born under the Sign of the Fishes. Monday, the 17th and Wednesday, the 19th can be notably productive but a new strategy may be called for on the 19th under the waxing first quarter Moon. Seek input from a more experienced co-worker. The Sun enters Gemini the afternoon of Thursday, the 20th. The bright, breezy vibrancy of the Twins is a welcome energy. Adding to the exuberance, the Sun forms a square with Jupiter on Friday morning, the 21st. Some souls drink fully of life, others look to expand their knowledge or set out on a grand voyage. Because Mercury is nearing a square with confusing Neptune, it may be wise to tone down expectations. At a minimum double check appointments and itineraries. We are also moving into spring eclipse season. Things begun the week of an eclipse rarely proceed as planned. Saturn turns retrograde on the 23rd, which is sure to slow or delay some projects. The Sagittarius Moon is full and eclipsed the morning of Wednesday the 26th. Close by her own south node, it’s an excellent time to let go of outworn ideas. Embrace moments of self-discovery. Venus tests Neptune the following afternoon. For some souls this is a time of heartache and disappointment. Others find renewed inspiration through faith and love. Friday, the 28th holds one of the month’s better social evenings. Mercury aligns with Venus, giving words extra sweetness. With the Winged Messenger stationary and about to go retrograde, unexpected reconnections sparkle over the holiday weekend. Mercury’s retrograde begins Saturday evening. Be ready to change your thinking as new facts will almost certainly be made known during the coming weeks. Mars’ trine to Neptune is May’s last major planetary alignment. You alone have the power to make your dreams come true.
JUNE
Confidence grows as June begins. The morning of Wednesday, the 2nd Venus settles into sensitive Cancer. Loyalties and affections are deeply felt. Thursday, the 3rd is a decisive day. The Gemini Sun trines Saturn. The stabilizing pairing reaffirms good choices and underscores the benefits of experience. The day is busy and highly productive. Venus’ evening trine to Jupiter is good reason to celebrate. Things take a turn as the weekend approaches. On Saturday, the 5th Mercury tests Neptune while Mars opposes Pluto. Morning hopefulness gives way to feelings of confusion and desperation after noon. Emotional maturity and poise are needed. If in doubt, put a hold on important decisions and negotiations. The evening’s void-of-course Aries Moon provides a timely opportunity to disentangle from a tough situation. Relax and decompress Saturday night. Several quiet days follow. The new Moon in Gemini ushers in a fresh activity cycle during the early morning of Thursday, the 10th. This is also a solar eclipse event. Once again, we are in a delicate time of revelations. Plans are apt to change. On Sunday, the 13th a solar square to Neptune adds new wrinkles and possible confusion. Saturn squares Uranus the following evening, lending Monday a fly-by-the-seat-of your-pants vibe. Be ready to adjust and improvise. The middle of the month is comparatively tranquil but the stars spice up June’s second half. Sunday, the 20th is very active. The Sun enters Cancer and summer begins. This is the 12 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. Jupiter turns retrograde in early Pisces, leading to a reevaluation of laws and beliefs and for some folks, a crisis of faith. Instincts are powerful, offering strength and confidence. Hearts are infused with empathy and compassion as Venus trines Neptune the following day. During Tuesday evening of the 22nd Mercury resumes forward motion. The direction change helps clarify a variety of issues, but some facts may remain questionable. Full Moon fever hits early. Wednesday, the 23rd sees great expectations as well as overwrought feelings. The full Moon in Capricorn is exact during the early afternoon of Thursday, the 24th. Jupiter helps most folks strike a healthy balance between work and play. The month closes under mellow skies.
JULY
Easy does it on Thursday, the 1st. Proceed with care. Both Mars opposing Saturn and a last quarter Aries Moon inflate stress levels. Saturday’s astrological omens are worrisome. Mars is square Uranus, an explosive combination that calls for extreme caution while traveling or using machinery. Slow down! Mixed trends continue on Sunday, the 4th. Independence Day celebrations may grow raucous in some locales. Our country is still searching for a renewed sense of identity and purpose. Progress is apparent in certain areas but nagging mistrust of government authority also lingers. The week of the 5th is an up and down ride. The Sun forms an exhilarating sextile to Uranus on Monday, the 5th, putting sparkle in everyday events. Multiple challenges require attention on Tuesday. With Venus igniting the Saturn/Uranus square, this is a time to be attentive to loved ones, as is Thursday, the 8th. Friday night’s new Moon in Cancer ushers in another activity cycle. There’s relatively smooth sailing from the 10th through the 16th but the Sun’s opposition to Pluto on Saturday, the 17th could bring a major shift in priorities. This first quarter Moon day is a good time to re-evaluate goals. Look within rather than pointing fingers. The evening of Wednesday, the 21st brings a more practical focus as Venus enters Virgo. Love is caring for others under this placement. The Sun arrives in spirited Leo the morning of Thursday, the 22nd. Summer heat is on. So, too, is an indulgent, party-like atmosphere as Venus opposes Jupiter and the Moon grows full. The high-flying Aquarius Moon is full the night of Friday, the 23rd. Heed the callings of your heart but if you socialize, do so with appropriate caution. Bodies of water and places of natural beauty are attractive destinations. Moonlight dancing by the water is wonderful! Mixed trends make communications challenging the weekend of the 24th and 25th. Keep in close touch with playmates. Be tactful on Thursday, the 29th. Passions rise as Mars opposes Jupiter. Don’t overstate what is obvious, and watch your temper. The last quarter Moon in Taurus sets off a dramatic fixed sign T-square on Saturday, the 31st. You definitely have more to gain using sweetness under this rather tense alignment.
AUGUST
Effective communicators are usually also great listeners. Remain open-minded on Sunday, the 1st. Decisive awareness and endings are likely as the Sun and Mercury oppose Saturn. Some commitments deepen but with a week of unpredictable twists and turns in store, it may be wise to keep your options open. The Sun’s square to Uranus caps off the tumultuous work week on Friday, the 6th. Review recent events and rethink plans on Saturday. Calmer trends arrive with the Leo new Moon of Sunday, the 8th. It’s time to get proactive. Monday and Tuesday strategy sessions become increasingly ambitious and culminate with a deal-sealing trine between Venus and Pluto during the evening of Wednesday, the 11th. Second opinions are helpful and the strength of partnerships is obvious. Strategies may need to be fine-tuned around the time of the first quarter Moon, exact on Sunday, the 15th. The week of the 16th races by. The Moon is waxing. Wednesday’s powerful Mercury/Mars conjunction is trine Uranus. On Thursday, the 19th the Sun opposes Jupiter. Big ideas make great things possible. The Aquarius Moon is full during the early morning hours of Sunday, the 22nd. With Jupiter close by the Moon, life is good. Dream big but don’t be gullible on Tuesday, the 24th when Mercury opposes Neptune. Second thoughts are timely the morning of Thursday, the 26th. Do your research and acquire needed information as Mercury aligns with Pluto. The forecast period ends under quiet skies. Savor these mellow late summer days but be respectful of the forces of Mother Nature. Keep safety in mind. Stay on top of weather forecasts and have appropriate gear on hand.
Eric Linter offers a complete range of astrological services including readings and classes. Contact him at stars@ericlinter.com or by telephone at 508-541-4115. Read his Daily Forecasts on the Spirit of Change homepage at spiritofchange.org.
Sacred Resonance Healing Reiki Master/Teacher EM 4 Practitioner Holy Fire III, Karuna Reiki Master/Practitioner Teacher Craniosacral Practitioner Geobiology Land Clearing
Bena Phillipo
We offer 60- or 90-minute sessions of Reiki, EM, or Craniosacral therapy. You can request to have a single modality used in a session or let your body decide what it needs. Certified Geobiology Land Clearing Practitioner, using quantum tools, light, sound vibration and Sacred Geometry to restore Mother Earth’s original blueprint, releasing her stress in a very gentle way.
Holy Fire III Reiki Classes and Reiki Shares beginning in June. www.SacredResonanceHealing.com | Bena@SacredResonanceHealing.com facebook.com/SacredResonanceHealing | 508-303-0366
Margo Roman, DVM on MICROBIOME RESTORATIVE THERAPY Main Street Animal Services of Hopkinton (MASH) provides Microbiome Restorative Therapy (MBRT) to restore the microbiome of our patients. MASH (www.mashvet.com) opened its doors in 1983, and in 2012, Dr. Margo Roman developed and added MBRT to the treatment options we offer. We have carefully screened, organically cared for, nurtured and loved our donors for 27 years — 5 generations. We love our dogs and cats! There is a real need for members of the veterinary profession to provide microbiome support to their patients. Pet parents need to have access to this therapy. You can read more about MBRT in a recent peer reviewed paper published in the IVC Journal Innovative Veterinary Care, Jan 2020 at https://ivcjournal.com/behavioral-changes-microbiome-restoration/?utm_ At MASH, we are using MBRT for an array of medical conditions, which results in our patients getting back on the road to health. Owners understand why this internal garden that supports 80% of their pet’s immune system is so important. For acute and chronic GI issues, IBD, chronic giardia, allergies, liver and kidney failure, autoimmune issues, overuse of antibiotics, viral/bacterial infections, Lyme, cancer and even behavioral issues, introducing a new diverse well balanced microbiome from proven super donors is the key to making MBRT successful. Incorporating the gut building support of digestive enzymes, pre- and probiotics, nutraceuticals and a diet free from chemicals, preservatives, glyphosate and other toxic products is also really important. The other part of the MBRT success is the addition of medical ozone to reduce the biofilm, which allows the new microbes to join the gut flora in a healthier balance. Ozone also stimulates the mitochondria of all cells including stem cells. Medical ozone is another key to reducing inflammation and pain, then activating the immune system through its oxidation. Medical ozone is even killing viruses, bacterial overgrowth, Lyme and other blood and tissue invaders. Cancer does not thrive in high levels of oxygen and medical ozone floods the body with oxygen. Cancer grows in a high CO2 environment, and adding ozone therapy to cancer therapies is very valuable in keeping the healthy tissues more vital. At Main Street Animal Services of Hopkinton (MASH), Massachusetts, www.mashvet.com, our doctors and staff are ready to help your animals with these cutting edge therapies. We also use acupuncture, homeopathy, laser, hyperbaric oxygen, Ultraviolet Blood Therapy (UVBI), PEMF, and herbal medicine, as well as lab diagnostics, preventative care with titers and vaccines if needed, dental cleanings, surgery and support for fresh organic raw diets, and even plant-based sustainable diets.
www.spiritofchange.org
SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 13
Early Spring
BIODYNAMIC COOKING BY ANNE-MARIE FRYER WIBOLTT
T
o really understand the essence of nutrition requires the courage to re-imagine the world and bring to our consciousness a view other than the purely material. The quality of our food, and especially the life forces of the meal we eat, is of greatest importance. The most outstanding quality of food that I am familiar with is produced by biodynamic farming. Biodynamic grapes have won nationwide popularity for their excellent taste and aroma, producing fabulous wines. Biodynamic farming is concerned with not only the environment that the food is grown in, but also with the qualitative processes in which the food is created. Cultures of the past, and perhaps some of our own grandparents, were aware that their crops received nourishment from Earth as well as the cosmos, the rhythmical cycles of the moon, sun and stars. They worked the land according to their observations of these cycles and treated their animals, plants and soil in a way that reflected this relationship. Biodynamic gardeners and farmers of today keep building on this respectful relationship. Biodynamic farmers experience their farms as individual, self-sustaining, living organisms that live and breathe with Earth in a sea of cosmic life forces. Everything is alive for the biodynamic farmer or gardener, who sees it as his or her responsibility to cultivate this connection to the spiritual cosmic world. S/he prepares the soil in such a way that it enables plants to take up the cosmic influences necessary for their growth, using special biodynamic preparations. They are made of substances from the farm, prepared in harmony with the seasonal rhythms and the natural processes of Earth and the cosmos. These biodynamic preparations are diluted in water using rhythmical movements and sprayed on the land and gardens. I think of them as homeopathic remedies for the soil. Scientist, artist and philosopher Rudolf Steiner inspired the use of these biodynamic preparations, which are made and used with the understanding of how Earthly and 14 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
cosmic forces interact throughout the year. He recognized that cosmic forces stream onto Earth, and are absorbed through the planet’s light, air and water, as well as the soil and its minerals. These cosmic forces support the plants in their growth. The quality and life forces of the plants we eat highly influence the quality of our thinking, feeling and interaction with people and nature, which in turn creates the condition of our society and the world. Rudolf Steiner was aware that a renewal of agriculture practices was necessary in order to reestablish the proper relationship between the cosmos and humanity, for the benefit of all the world. What distinguishes biodynamic farming from other healthy farming practices such as permaculture and organic farming is that biodynamic farmers consciously think and work in a practical way with these Earthly and cosmic forces and rhythms. Sowing and harvesting are carefully done at the most favorable times in relationship to the sun, moon and planetary rhythms. In addition to working with the cosmic rhythms, applying biodynamic preparations and composted cow manure, these farmers also maintain healthy soil by rotating crops, incorporating plenty of organic matter into the soil and other holistic agricultural activities. Animals, especially cows, also play a big part in the life of the biodynamic farm, and ensure a cycling of substances and life forces. Cows are grazers and have an elaborate digestive system. They eat grasses and other roughage, and in return produce rich manure permeated with their own life forces and qualities. When the soil receives this valuable cow manure, composted with biodynamic preparations, its soil life is enhanced. This composted manure creates nourishing humus that is able to draw in the beneficial forces of the sun, moon, star and planets, which in turn supports healthy plants. Ideally, every biodynamic farm or garden has its own
beehives as well. Bees live entirely in the world of air, light and warmth and are an essential part of the interrelationship of the cosmic forces. Spring is an active season for any farmer or gardener. The light becomes stronger and brighter welcoming the greening of the fields and gardens. Earth once more shows its abundance of life forces. The introversion of winter has passed. Beauty seems to well forth from all reaches of the cosmos with joy and anticipation. These spring recipes encourage new beginnings and lightness of body and soul. They are colorful, delicious and nourishing. Each dish is beautiful, an artwork in itself, simple in its form and interesting to make.
CREAMY WHITE BEANS WITH CILANTRO AND LEMON
This dish is creamy with a zest of spring. The northern white beans can be substituted with baby lima or navy beans. Tahini is a paste made of freshly ground roasted or raw sesame seeds. Double the recipe and serve the next day for lunch in a rolled-up tortilla, as a spread or in a soup. 1 cup Great Northern white beans 3 cups of water 2-3 inch kombu sea vegetable 1 bay leaf 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1 medium onion, diced 1/2 teaspoon sea salt 2 tablespoons fresh ground tahini (optional) 2 tablespoons finely cut cilantro 1 tablespoon finely grated lemon rind 1. Sort through the beans, rinse and soak for 8 hours. 2. Drain the beans and place them in a pressure cooker or heavy bottomed pot with three cups of water. Bring the beans to a boil and skim off the foam that rises. 3. Add the kombu and the bay leaf. Place the lid on the pot. If using a pressure cooker bring it to full pressure and let the beans simmer over very low heat for 1 hour. Bring the pressure down slowly. Otherwise let the beans boil for 3-4 hours or until completely soft. Add water from time to time. Discard the bay leaf and any remains of the kombu. 4. In a saucepan heat the oil and sauté the onions for 2 minutes or until they become shiny. Add salt and onions to the beans and boil covered until onions are soft, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes. The beans can be thickened by mashing some of them lightly or made thinner by adding a little water. 5. Season the beans with tahini, cilantro and grated lemon rind.
BLANCHED DEEP GREEN WATERCRESS
Watercress can be found throughout winter and spring by running streams. Pick watercress where the stream begins or buy them freshly cut at your local market. Blanching the watercress brings out a deep and glowing green color and removes some of the bitterness and pungent flavors. Also try garden purslane prepared the same way. If none of these are available substitute with other cooked greens. 1 big bunch watercress Dashes of hot sauce
1. Clean the watercress very well several times. 2. Bring 1 quart of water to a boil. Submerge the watercress in the boiling water and blanch for 20 seconds. They will shrink quite a bit. Remove the watercress from the boiling water and submerge in a bowl of cold water to stop the cooking process. 3. Cut the watercress in 1/2 inch pieces. Serve as they are, beautiful and delicious, with a dash of hot sauce.
SHITAKE MUSHROOMS AND SNAP PEAS SAUTE
Shitake mushrooms are appreciated for their medicinal qualities. Fresh or dried shitake can be used in this appetizing dish. The peas complement the soft, brownish mushrooms well with their shinny green color, sweet taste and crunchy texture. 1 pound snap peas 1/2 pound fresh shitake mushrooms or 2 oz (1cup) dried shitake 2 tablespoon dark roasted sesame oil or extra virgin olive oil 1 tablespoon maple syrup (optional) 2 tablespoons tamari soy sauce
1. If using dried shitake, soak them in water for 20 minutes. Save the soaking water for soup. 2. Trim the ends and remove strings from the snap peas. Trim and discard the stalk ends of the shitake mushrooms. Cut the shitake mushrooms in thick slices. 3. Heat a frying pan. Add oil and shitake. Sauté the mushrooms for 4 minutes over medium heat. Stir from time to time. Add snap peas, cover the pan with a lid and let them steam for 2 minutes or until tender, bright green and crunchy. 4. Season the peas with maple syrup and tamari soy sauce and sauté for 1 minute. Place the shitake and snap peas in a serving dish right away.
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APPLE CARROT BALLS
This dish is so refreshing and delicious that your meal will not need a dessert. Apple carrot balls add a beautiful warm and radiant orange to your table. 2 sweet apples 2 large carrots 1 pinch of sea salt 4 mint leaves for decoration 1. Quarter the apples and core each quarter. 2. Grate apples and carrots finely. Add salt and mix well. 3. Right before serving form 6-8 balls and place them on mint leaves. Anne-Marie Fryer Wiboltt is a Waldorf class and kindergarten teacher, biodynamic farmer, author and nutritional counselor. She has taught nutritional cooking and counseled for 25 years in her homeland Denmark, Europe and the United States, and is the author of two books: “Cooking for the Love of the World, Awakening to Our Spirituality Through Cooking” and “Cooking for and with Children, Preparing for the Life of the Future”. Visit www.cookingfortheloveoftheworld.com. www.spiritofchange.org
SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 15
JOURNAL OF NATURAL HEALING
Learning to Listen By Vir McCoy
I used the intuitive information I received as well as the science I researched to liberate myself from Lyme.
I
n 2001 I lived in Marin County, a rural area north of San Francisco Bay, where I worked as a field biologist. While taking a shower, I found a tick embedded in my armpit. Two weeks later, I noticed a rash on my stomach. Maybe it's poison oak, I thought? But it didn't itch. I let it go. A month later, I noticed creeping, itchy arthritis in my right hip. Then not long after, I was playing guitar, and my arm would not move as commanded. My friend said, "Dude, there's something wrong with you!" I went to a doctor friend and flipped through his book of diseases. When I got to L, I knew what it was. I got tested for Lyme (Borrelia). It came back positive. The treatment was 30 days of the antibiotic doxycycline, which cleared out all my symptoms. Cured, I thought. Little did I know it was just the beginning of a near 10year nightmare. Lyme lays "eggs" or encysts. The cysts can be dormant for months, then hatch and mutate. The tick can dump other bacteria and parasites into your body that need different kinds of treatment. Long-term sufferers will tell you the illness can be interminable if Lyme isn't eradicated early. It transforms into "persister" cells and can create an autoimmune situation where your immune system is trying to play catch up. A few months later, all the symptoms and much more came raging back. I was hospitalized, receiving intravenous antibiotics because Lyme had developed into a kind of meningitis ravaging my brain. As I lay in the hospital bed, I began to cry. I was in a state of utter despair. What was going on? Why was I sick again? 16 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
I focused on my breathing and prayed. Lyme was jumbling my brain, I couldn't think, but I could feel. If I can still feel and breathe, then I can love and exist, I thought. I felt into my brain and asked, What's the matter? as if my brain were a baby. With all of the love and tender feelings I could muster, I cradled my brain and asked again: What's the matter? I love you, brain. What's wrong? A miracle happened. I had a vision. I saw a beautiful large oak tree in the woods, and up the side of the trunk, shelf mushrooms were spiraling up the tree toward the sky. I need these, I thought. I recognized two kinds of mushrooms from my work as a field biologist. One was reishi mushrooms, another was turkey tail mushroom, and there was a third kind, but I would have to wait till I got out of the hospital to look it up. It was chaga. I researched the mushrooms and discovered reishi mushrooms have been used in Chinese medicine as an immune booster for thousands of years. Turkey tail mushrooms are also immune boosters and are part of an anticancer drug currently being developed and tested called PSK. Chaga turned out to be another incredible immune booster, according to research by world renowned mushroom expert Paul Stamets. While these mushrooms are now quite popular, in 2002 they were unheard of. I began to hone my intuitive skills and practice the art of intuitive sensory perception inside my body. I noted what I was seeing, tasting, smelling, and hearing during my motherly loving meditations with my brain. Then I had another breakthrough. While inward
viewing, I saw cysts inside my body. Lyme can lie dormant for up to a year or more, and those cysts — nasty little eggs — were inside my brain. I saw rows of them like peas in a peapod. They were coated with a biofilm and with what looked like a pencil on top. I couldn't understand what this image was. I worked with my sensory perception and realized my body was speaking to me symbolically. About a week after this vision, I wandered into the supplement section of the market. In the homeopathic aisle, I saw a little blue tube labeled Graphites. That's in pencils, I thought. What do graphites do exactly? According to the homeopathic pamphlet, "Graphites can dissolve toughened skin, scars, boils, and cysts." Holy Moses! Pencils over eggs! My intuition told me that graphites and similar homeopathic remedies could dissolve Lyme cysts. Graphites became a crucial component of my healing. It was a huge breakthrough. After this, I started trusting the more profound wisdom that came through the senses from a place deeper than my mind. I wrote down a multitude of foods, herbs, and antibiotics my body identified for me. I also started seeing stuck feelings and other things that were dampening my immunity. I used the intuitive information I received along with the science I researched to affirm what I was intuiting, and worked closely with a few Lyme specialists to liberate myself from Lyme. I used both sets of knowing to collect information and facts. I would often be shown a remedy and then find the medical research that confirmed what I had intuited. This method helped me validate what I was seeing and sensing. In addition to many common antibiotics and herbs, I discovered several unusual medicines and techniques for Lyme that I had never heard of. However, the most profound healing came late in my near 10-year journey. I went to the Mono Basin in the eastern Sierras in California on a vision quest. Any Lyme suffer knows there is a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety with Lyme. I would often wake with panic attacks, not being able to sleep. On the 8th day in the desert, I went into a massive panic attack. I thought I was going to die and lose my mind. Why was I so terrified of this bacterium, I asked myself. How could a little piece of life devastate my life? Anger and fear swirled around me. Then I had the thought that changed me forever. What if I love Lyme? What if I love the monster? It was like a million light bulbs went off. With all the love I could muster, I cradled an imaginary worm-like bacteria; I blessed it. Although at the bottom of the karmic totem pole of life, Lyme is still alive. I thought, what if I were Lyme? A lowly, evil little creature, just trying to survive. I had a sense of compassion for the Lyme, sadness for its life. At that moment, it lost its power over me. By blessing the enemy, it no longer had control. I had weakened it, and this moment was the real healing. The Lyme became my teacher, showing me how to reclaim my power and remain symptom-free. Vir McCoy works as a healer and a field biologist and botanist, focusing on endangered species, and is the co-author with Kara Zahl of "Liberating Yourself from Lyme" (Healing Arts Press, 2020).
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SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 17
Hello…My Name is
Earth Just like yours, my name begins with an upper case letter, and there is no “the” before my name. When do you ever say “the susan” or “the Jupiter”? Adding “the” before my name turns me into an object — an object for you to use. Using my proper name in your speech and writing reminds you who I am. I am a living source of perpetual giving — an intelligent matrix that supplies you and all creation with the balance of natural forces and life-sustaining elements that nourish us. There is plenty for all when we share. Like your own mother, upon whom you also once depended for your very existence, I thrive under your loving care and attention. Or if necessary, I can fend for myself to ward off your misuse or neglect. Names have power. Mine is Earth.
18 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
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This woman had only a few hours sleep the previous night and felt exhausted at the time this photo was taken.
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After wearing the Personal Rejuvenizer for only 20 minutes, she reported feeling more awake, energized and refreshed.
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www.lighthealing.com SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 19
Joshua Brott, Obscura Digital
THE CONSEQUENCES OF HUMAN PLUNDER
We have to understand that we cannot perpetrate a mass extinction and come out winners
E
Interview with EILEEN CRIST by LEATH TONINO
ileen Crist knows more than a person should, more than seems healthy, about dying birds and dying watersheds. She’s keenly aware of the global crisis of biodiversity loss and ecological collapse, and she sees what’s driving it: direct causes like climate change and what she calls the “ultimate causes” — population growth, overconsumption, and technological power. But the thing that really interests Crist, the thing that she’s been studying and publicizing for the past three decades as a professor and radical environmental thinker, is an even deeper question: Why is so little being done to address this planetary emergency? She attempts, with a mix of intellectual rigor and lyrical passion, to provide an answer in her 2019 book, Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization. The cause of our inaction, she says, is “human supremacy,” a
20 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
largely unconscious belief that Homo sapiens are the masters of creation rather than just one humble species among millions. This worldview sanctions not only factory farming, clear-cut logging, mountaintop-removal mining, and bottom-trawl fishing, but also more commonplace behaviors such as cruising along in cars that slaughter wildlife and emit carbon dioxide. As long as human supremacy prevails, Crist writes, “humanity will remain unable to muster the will to scale down and pull back the burgeoning human enterprise that is unraveling Earth’s biological wealth.” Crist is a synthesizer of statistics and ideas. (The bibliography for Abundant Earth cites sources ranging from philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler to the United Nations Environment Programme.) She holds a PhD in sociology from Boston University and recently took an early retirement, at the age of
Solitaire Goldfield
Animal photos projected in 2015 onto the Empire State Building during “Projecting Change," and onto the Vatican during the 2015 COP 21 international climate conference resulted in over 5 billion media impressions worldwide. The projection events producer and film director, LOUIS PSIHOYOS, aims to get 10% of the population aware of the extinction crisis through films such as “Racing Extinction,” that highlight the building photos. www.opsociety.org
EILEEN CRIST
fifty-nine, from twenty-two years of teaching in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. Since the publication of her first book, Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind, in 1999, she has coedited a number of anthologies on topics ranging from overpopulation to wildlife conservation to the holism of Earth. Her writing has appeared in Science, BioScience, Environmental Humanities, and Environmental Ethics, and she helps edit the online journal The Ecological Citizen. I’ve been aware of Crist’s writing for quite some time, but it wasn’t until I’d read, and then reread, Abundant Earth that I felt compelled to request an interview. Due to the pandemic, our conversation had to be conducted via phone. Crist resides in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband, who is president of an international Tibetan Buddhist organization, and their two dogs. At the start of the conversation I asked for a description of her surroundings. Crist said she was on the basement floor, looking out at the garden on a rainy, overcast day. I pictured a ground-level window that put her eye-to-eye with the grass and the flowers and the vegetables, not above them.
L
EATH TONINO: What are we talking about when we refer to the “global
ecological crisis”? What’s actually happening on this planet — to this planet — right now? EILEEN CRIST: What’s happening is the collapse of the web of life: biological diversity, wildlife populations, wild ecologies. We’re in the midst of a mass-extinction event. It’s called the “sixth extinction,” because there have been five others in the last 540 million years. Mass extinctions are extremely rare. They’re monumental setbacks, not normal events. It takes 5 to 10 million years for life to recover from one. Species would be vanishing approximately one thousand times slower without the human impact. They’re going extinct primarily because the environment is changing so rapidly, so catastrophically, that they can’t adapt. If we keep going as we’re going, we will likely lose 50 percent or more of the planet’s species in this century. So that’s huge, but there’s more — or, rather, more is happening en route to that bleak future. We’re also seeing the loss of entire ecosystems and biomes, such as coral reefs and grasslands. Freshwater systems and tropical forests are being hit hard. Biological phenomena are disappearing — for instance, migrations. And in addition to outright extinction, there are wholesale eliminations of local populations of plants and animals. The killing of wildlife is so profound that scientists have coined the term defaunation to capture it. We’re emptying out the planet. Big or small, herbivores or carnivores, marine or freshwater or terrestrial — it’s happening across the board. LEATH TONINO: The environmental ethicist Holmes Rolston describes humandriven extinction as “superkilling,” saying it kills “essences,” not just “existences.” How do you interpret that? EILEEN CRIST: Rolston is spot-on to call it a superkilling. There’s a sad and facile view circulating that extinction is natural, so what does it matter if it’s humancaused? What this ignores is that the vast majority of species becoming extinct are www.spiritofchange.org
robust, meaning they’re well adapted to their surroundings. These are healthy species experiencing overwhelming pressure from human onslaught. And they’re usually experiencing pressure from more than one driver. Eighty percent of the species looked at in one study were found to be under pressure from multiple directions: pollution, nonnative species, poaching, climate change, and so on. When we drive a species to extinction, we’re prematurely taking out of existence a unique, amazing manifestation of life that has never existed before and will never arise again, and we’re extinguishing all possibilities of its evolution into new forms. “Superkilling” is a good way to put it. Killing an individual is one thing, but killing a species — let alone 50 percent of the species on the planet — is something else entirely. It’s murder that reverberates farther than we can see or imagine. LEATH TONINO: You mentioned multiple drivers, but let’s talk about just one for now: What role does agriculture play in all this? EILEEN CRIST: Agriculture is huge. Much of the damage it inflicts is through habitat destruction and fragmentation: something like 40 percent of Earth’s ice-free land is given over to agriculture. Farming isn’t inherently wrong or evil, but largescale industrial agriculture drives populations of native species off the land. That’s the way it’s practiced: a kind of takeover, an invasion. It also kills species that are perceived as a threat — for example, carnivores. Another aspect is that agriculture claims about 70 percent of the fresh water that humans use. And it’s a fierce polluter. With its artificial nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides and everything else, it’s arguably the greatest polluter of air, land, fresh water, and estuaries. It’s responsible for a substantial portion of greenhouse-gas emissions, too. So agriculture, and the food system overall, is a significant factor in climate change. LEATH TONINO: Climate change is often portrayed as the environmental problem — like, if we could wave a magic wand and fix the climate, everything else would sort itself out. What are your thoughts on that? EILEEN CRIST: Climate change is massively destructive, and the situation couldn’t be more urgent. It will bring, and has already brought, a lot of suffering to both humans and nonhumans, and it’s feeding into ecosystem collapse because the changes are occurring so swiftly. But the reason climate change has penetrated public awareness is because an overheated planet directly threatens humanity and civilization. Mass extinction, the unraveling of the web of life, isn’t seen as so grave, because it isn’t viewed as an existential threat to us. It’s happening to them: the insects, the fish, the frogs, the birds. Putting aside the fact that these animals have inherent worth, we are making the typical mistake of thinking that humans are somehow separate from, and not dependent upon, Earth’s natural systems. Another thing to notice is that there are some potential technological solutions to climate change, and our society loves technological fixes. Many people feel we could get a handle on this monstrous thing if only we shifted our approach to how we produce and use energy. Mass extinction, on the other hand, doesn’t have a technological silver bullet. If we want to address mass extinction, we have to find a different way of life. We have to scrutinize human expansionism: the endless expansion of our numbers, our consumption, our infrastructure, our use of the lands and seas. But that’s a tall order. So talk about mass extinction is muted. Viewing climate change as the root problem is dangerous because, even if we do manage to address it, there’s no guarantee we won’t continue to run down the planet. LEATH TONINO: So you see human expansionism as the root problem? EILEEN CRIST: There are two sides of the coin. One is what we’ve been discussing: Continued on page 22 SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 21
THE CONSEQUENCES OF HUMAN PLUNDER continued from page 21
cause-and-effect relationship there? EILEEN CRIST: When humans settled and devoted themselves to the domestication the collapse of life’s diversity at all levels, from biomes and ecosystems, down through of animals and plants, more and more wild nature was converted into cultivated nature, species and subspecies, and finally to genes. There’s so much reporting, so many articles into engineered nature. Wild animals were now seen as adversaries, competitors in the about specific threats — imperiled mangroves, amphibians, migrating birds, and so field or predators of the flocks. on — but rarely is the whole picture conveyed. These are all one story with a single Over time human beings became almost exclusively focused on human affairs. overarching theme: devastating loss. It’s important for us to know where we’re headed, This intensified with the building of walls around human settlements and increasing to know the predicament life is in — not lives, but life itself. urbanization. The other side of the coin has to do with expansionism — the colonization of With agriculture human populations started to grow, and soils became depleted. everything, the humanization of the planet. We’re turning the planet into a human This put pressure on societies to expand their search for food. Around the same time, monoculture. Of course, no monoculture is literally homogeneous. What we’re seeing hierarchy and social stratification were becoming entrenched. Some classes of people is a population of 7.8 billion Homo sapiens, along with the billions of livestock and acquired more wealth and power than others, and more control over land. Others cultivated plants that feed us; some token wild species that are kept in restricted spaces worked the fields or in crafts. and whose numbers are tightly managed; and some species that can parasitize our way So, on the one hand, there was population growth and soil degradation. On the of life. And the human monoculture continually replaces landscapes with constructed other hand, there was greed for power and wealth among the elites. These two things environments. All told, it’s a crisis of domination. colluded, and armies came into existence. The history of LEATH TONINO: Back in the 1940s Aldo Leopold, the civilization is the history of war. War, or the threat of it, became pioneering ecologist and conservationist, said we should Learning environmental the chief instrument for acquiring land, slaves, loot, and tribute. change the role of Homo sapiens “from conqueror of the landThe separation of humans from the wild, our antagonism community to plain member and citizen of it.” history is indispensable toward wild animals, and our growing power over domestic EILEEN CRIST: That passage is one of the most frequently plants and animals all started to foster a human sense of pride, quoted of Leopold’s, and rightly so, because it captures the in order to see that an of being in command, of being superior. By the time the horns of the dilemma: we can dominate the planet as if it were classical era rolled around, philosophy and political theory were human-owned, or we can participate in life’s beauty, in the impoverished world, asking, “How are humans different from animals?” Through wider world — which doesn’t mean we stop manipulating or this inquiry, which was kept up over many centuries, humans impacting, only that we do so with care and a respect for limits. taken over by one elevated themselves to a distinguished level of being: the only Actually, it’s not a matter of can but of must. Leopold wrote species, is not normal. entity with reason, language, culture, ethics, or what have you, that so many years ago, and here we are, still wrestling with this all of which animals supposedly lack. issue. No matter how painful, So human supremacy was established in this twofold The most important thing to expose and dissect is human manner: geographical takeover on the one hand, and supremacy. It often gets referred to by the gentler term young people need to disparagement of the nonhuman world on the other. The anthropocentrism. I view it as a widely shared, unconscious nonhuman world became regarded as devoid of inherent worldview that tells us we are superior to the rest of nature and understand the damage meaning. It became dispensable, forgettable, and killable. thus entitled to treat nonhumans and their habitats however we And this continues. For example, nation-states and please. Human specialness, human aboveness, and the sanctity we have done. companies are gearing up to start the commercial mining of of the human prerogative — those are key elements, along with the deep sea for gold, copper, cobalt, rare earths, and other our seizing the power of life and death over nonhumans and our minerals. The deep sea is one of the last places on Earth that is relatively undisturbed by aggressive control of all geographical space. human activity, but the occupation machine spares nothing; it has no sense of restraint. I don’t think human supremacy is an explicit ideology, though it can take that form. LEATH TONINO: As you’ve become more aware of supremacist thinking in the Mostly it operates as a kind of background assumption about what humans are, what the world at large, you must also be grappling with it at the personal level. Do you recall any rest of the world is, and what the relationship between the two should be. It’s a worldview specific moments when you were shocked to see a form of supremacy inside yourself? that isn’t looked at directly but nonetheless shapes our attitudes and governs our actions. EILEEN CRIST: I’ve never told this story to anyone, but when I was eleven years old, Take factory farms, which are on the rise globally. In these spaces, animals are treated I killed a crab. The crab was hiding in some rocks, back in a crevice, and I reached in with abysmal cruelty and indifference. Treating sentient beings as though they have with a knife and stabbed it between the eyes. I remember the crab looking at me, trying no inherent experience, feeling, or interest — how can something so extreme occur to make itself small. I remember its eyes, and I remember the knife. without the mandate of human supremacy? Another example is converting entire I was living in Greece at the time — my mother is Greek, and we spent several years there biomes to human use. A poster case is grasslands: 98 percent of the tallgrass prairie here during my childhood — and we were fishing as a family, so it was normal to kill marine in the United States has been converted to farmland to grow mostly corn, wheat, and life. Still, I felt sick with remorse the moment I stabbed the crab, and incredibly ashamed. It soy. What gives us the right to take over and destroy an entire biome? It’s one thing to changed me, because in that moment I saw that I was capable of acting almost mechanically. cultivate a piece of prairie and grow some food. It’s very different to seize, repurpose, I learned something else from that crab: that there is a deep part of us that knows the and essentially destroy the whole thing. But, you know, that’s taken as normal, because difference between good and bad. Goodness isn’t a thing we humans arbitrarily assign it’s perfectly acceptable from a human-supremacist point of view. to the world, but something inherent in the world. The world, if you will, prefers life Another example: some 97 percent of the world’s oceans are legally open to fishing. and life-affirming behaviors. When we follow goodness, we’re in the flow of life, and Industrial fishing strips them of their life and has the gall to call fish and their habitats when we violate goodness, we experience a painful disjunction. That’s the source of the “fish stock” and “fisheries,” as if they were human property — an outrageous example remorse and shame I felt, that disjunction. of our sense of entitlement. Again, it’s an absurd level of appropriation that passes for LEATH TONINO: How do we wake up from the trance of human supremacy? Do we normal, or at least inevitable. need a different story, a different set of values? We could go on down the line with examples: mountaintop removal, killing contests EILEEN CRIST: Human supremacy is a historical inheritance that we’ve been of animals such as coyotes and sharks, poisoning the world with [the herbicide] saddled with through conditioning, and once the conditioning is removed, reality glyphosate. The bottom line is that this huge gamut of attitudes and actions and will have a chance to come into view, and we’ll then have the opportunity to align institutions is what makes human supremacy a worldview, albeit one that isn’t fully ourselves with it. conscious. For me, there’s a good bit of hope in that last part: If it is made fully There are aspects of Earth’s reality that we could emphasize, and interdependence is conscious, it will be seen in a different light. Its normality will be disrupted. We can a place to start. We are completely dependent on this living planet for every breath we become revolted by it. And revolt is linked with revolution. take. And we are beholden to the planet not just in terms of survival but in terms of who LEATH TONINO: You’re linking human supremacy with agriculture. What’s the 22 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
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Getty Images for Oceanic Preservtion Society
we are. Whatever attributes we claim as unique to the human species, such as our propensity for art and science and spirituality — these are gifts of the ground. Curiosity and exploration and awe require a world — a ground — to grow up from and in conversation with. I take hope from the thought that human beings are, at a primordial level, in love with Earth, our source. This love is obstructed by our sense of specialness, the sense that we are meant to own and control. When we remove the human-supremacy story, however, what comes through will be what already exists: love for this oasis in the cosmos, this mystery that we will never re-create or even fully comprehend. That’s the real story. LEATH TONINO: You mentioned that we are looking for technological solutions to climate change. Is the environmental movement healthy and strong, or has it been co-opted by a technological approach to solving problems? EILEEN CRIST: Mainstream environmentalism is quite infatuated with technological solutions. Oftentimes it’s not critical enough of consumerism and economic growth, and for the past twenty years or so it went silent about the human-population question. It puts a lot of emphasis on the renewable-energy transition. Yes, solar and wind are part of the solution, of course, but much more important is degrowth — slowing the economy, decreasing production, downscaling global trade. Our global trade system shuttles inordinate amounts of stuff around the world, lots of which is unnecessary, and enormous amounts of greenhouse gasses are released in the process. Extolling the merits of solar and wind is fine, but it’s nothing compared to creating a downsized, mindful material culture that is locally and regionally oriented. So, no, in my opinion the mainstream environmental movement appears unwilling to go deep enough. That said, it isn’t wise to constantly heap criticism on mainstream environmentalism. It has played a very important role. The big environmental organizations of the twentieth century made some impressive achievements on the ground, and they’ve succeeded in raising awareness and knowledge. I often go to the World Wildlife Fund’s website, for example, to get facts about a specific place or species. These groups are like a bridge between mainstream culture and radical ecology. As I’ve been saying, many of us don’t consciously subscribe to the belief that Earth is human-owned or that nonhuman life lacks inherent worth and is dispensable — but we live in accordance with this stance regardless. Radical ecology takes the offensive, refusing to stand by and watch. It calls attention to the fact that all life has inherent value. It insists that justice means not only justice for humans, but justice for all species. LEATH TONINO: You’re saying Americans cannot continue to live as we have lived. We must change. Period. And yet we have to make breakfast each morning, put the diaper on the baby, get to work, survive another day. EILEEN CRIST: In the developed world, as long as we’re plugged into electricity and everything that entails, we’re pretty badly tangled up. I’m talking to you on my phone right now, but I don’t know where it was made, who made it, under what conditions, or where the materials for it were sourced. I don’t know how much destruction it has left in its wake or what garbage bin it’s ultimately going to end up in. And this is just one object: I could say the same about my toaster, my refrigerator, and on down the line. So, I’m caught in the system — like pretty much everybody I know — and it’s from within this tangle that all of us have to try to make changes. Speaking generally, what we can all do is prepare for a transition, and that has as much to do with altering our expectations, our thinking, as it does with altering our behaviors. COVID-19 really blindsided us and is a reminder that change can arrive suddenly. Environmentalists have been saying this for decades: expect the unexpected. The twenty-first-century world is incredibly complicated. There’s a huge acceleration on every front, including the collapse of nature, and this can mean only one thing: uncertainty. We’ve got to expect the unexpected and be ready to shift in response. To my mind, the most important thing we can do is learn about our food and how it’s produced. Food is so basic and is tied to everything. It might sound idealistic, but there’s no way around it: humans must inhabit food communities that are ecological and ethical, that grow wholesome food in friendship with the natural world — and this
nutritious food has to be available for all. These are the kinds of communities that we need to start building or, where they already exist, learning from and supporting. What would happen if some global catastrophe — a climate-related problem or a war or a more virulent epidemic than COVID-19 — disrupted our food system? In this current pandemic the fear and upheaval drove Americans to hoard toilet paper and guns and ammo. Try to imagine a food shortage instead of a scarcity of toilet paper. Recognizing our participation in destructive, human-supremacist systems may bring up rage or grief or guilt on a daily basis, and that’s OK. We can acknowledge those feelings. We can allow those feelings to tell us something true about the world and about ourselves, and we can move through them into action. The most important thing we can do is to create alternative communities where we model a different way of living, and the core of these communities will start with food, because when was the last time you passed a day without eating? LEATH TONINO: Does history or anthropology provide us with any particularly inspiring or useful examples of alternative communities? EILEEN CRIST: Many Indigenous communities are good models — not necessarily of exactly what a life on the land should look like, but models of principles. What do Indigenous people do? They live within the contours of the land. They live within a Continued on page 24 SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 23
Joshua Brott, Obscura Digital
THE CONSEQUENCES OF HUMAN PLUNDER continued from page 23 place, making themselves a subsystem of it. In terms of what they eat and how they eat, what they use and how they use it, the land is their guide. They don’t take over and impose their structures. They don’t continually expand and conquer, as is the habit of colonial and human-supremacist cultures. Rather, they adjust to their surroundings, devising techniques for living within their regions. Also, Indigenous communities have regular celebrations of the natural world — greeting the seasons, greeting the berries, greeting the salmon, whatever it may be. These are both a form of grateful acknowledgment and a tool for remembering. In colonial, resource-hungry cultures we don’t know what was here before us, and in some cases we don’t even recognize that there was a “before us.” Every generation assumes its surroundings are the norm, even if previous generations have degraded the land. This is referred to as the “declining ecological baseline.” It’s invisible, because there’s no memory of a different time when, for instance, you could drink water straight from the stream or eat fruit straight from the tree. If you have ceremonies — techniques for observing, stories about your animal and plant neighbors — you can at once honor the more-than-human world and remember it. One more thing we can learn from Indigenous communities is animism, the worldview that sees everything as alive, as wondrous in itself. A major component of human supremacy is the tacit idea that animals don’t see us. We are the active agents — we see them. In an Indigenous culture a human sees the animal and, simultaneously, sees that he or she is being seen. There’s a mutual recognition not only with animals but with plants, rocks, everything. I want to make it clear that I’m not looking to Indigenous communities as a literal model: “Oh, we’ll mimic such-and-such people, and then things will be fine!” It’s the principles of living within the affordances of a place, the ceremonies of gratitude and remembering, and the awareness that everything is alive. We have to learn to embody these principles in our own unique places. LEATH TONINO: To change our way of life we require some sort of program, a regimen that will break down old habits and replace them with new habits, right? I’m interested in the pragmatic aspect of all this. EILEEN CRIST: Decolonizing our minds and breaking habits of supremacy requires 24 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
critical thinking: look at what the culture’s throwing at you, see it clearly, and then decide whether to accept or refuse it. A simple idea, though difficult to enact, is slowness: only by creating some time and space in our lives will we have a chance to pivot from blind acceptance to critical thought. The dominant cult of speed is, for me personally, something to target and try to undermine. Why is it that we drive too fast, eat too fast, walk too fast, get out of bed too fast? Why do we jam our to-do lists with so many chores and believe they all need to be taken care of ASAP? Why are we multitasking, looking at our screens as we’re cooking or exercising? This relentless acceleration is reinforced by so much that surrounds us that it’s easy to fall back into speed even if you’re aiming for slowness. But you can chip away at it. Do something slowly on purpose. Then do it again. Eventually things might begin to open up. LEATH TONINO: What’s your take on the common argument that human nature is to blame for the ecological crisis? EILEEN CRIST: It’s a dangerous view and often boils down to an excuse for resignation, continued destruction, and cynicism. It fails to appreciate the power of socialization, which is the biggest determinant of how people think and act. People comply with the values, norms, and actions they learn from their societies. Human nature contains the capacity for all sorts of things: from the coarsest kind of selfishness to a lifetime of selfless service. LEATH TONINO: I can imagine a person saying, “We all have to use nature — eat it, affect it in various ways. That’s not supremacy.” How do you respond to that? EILEEN CRIST: Yes, we have to use the natural world, as all animals do. Though I prefer to avoid the word use, because of something I heard [eco-theologian] Thomas Berry say in a documentary. He said: “What’s the worst thing that one person can say to another? ‘You used me.’ ” He’s right. That’s as bad as it gets. Then Berry said: “What would Earth say to us if Earth could speak? ‘You used me.’ ” Right again. We have to work with the natural world, to source from it, but there’s a huge difference between growing food through industrial agriculture versus agriculture modeled on ecological principles. The former demolishes biodiversity, dislocates and kills the nonhuman, degrades the soil, and pollutes the world with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. The latter, called “agroecology,” is mindful of diversity, both cultivated and wild, and seeks to preserve it. It appreciates the nonhumans and
natural processes that have made the very soil that grows our food. It builds up the soil. Agroecology works with wild nature and tries to find artful ways to negotiate with wild nonhumans who may pose a threat to the cultivated plants or to farm animals. Practitioners of agroecology do not automatically choose the options of poison and killing — far from it. We can also think about this question of “use” in terms of scale. Scale matters. Think about cars, for example. Cars are not going to be uninvented. Humans seem to like them — at least, for now. It’s one thing, however, to have 1 billion cars in the world, as we do now. It’s a whole new level to have 4 or 5 billion cars, as we might in this century. So how about a world with fewer cars and a lot more restraint in terms of roadbuilding? LEATH TONINO: How big a problem is capitalism? If capitalism disappeared, but we were all still under the spell of human supremacy, would nature be any better off? EILEEN CRIST: Capitalism is a core driver of ecological destruction. It gobbles up the world as “raw materials” and turns them into commodities, with immense waste at every step along the way. The destructiveness of this economic system goes hand in hand with a huge and growing global middle class, an increasingly global culture of consumerism, and overthe-top global trade. In qualitative terms, middle-class status comes with electricity, expendable income, and participation in the global economy. The size of the global middle class surpassed half the total human population in 2018, and it’s expected to reach about 5 billion people by 2030. The fundamental socioeconomic phenomenon of our time is mass production and mass consumption at a global scale, for billions of increasingly affluent people. This means extreme drawdown of resources, unsustainable pollution, and ecological ruin. Making capitalism more equitable would be good for humans, but nature would be no better off, as long as mass production and mass consumption remained essentially unchanged and the natural world continued to be treated as human property. So, it is not only capitalism that has to go but also human supremacy. We must reenvision our relationship with Earth, recognizing its intrinsic splendor and letting its inhabitants be free, letting them have the space to be who they are. LEATH TONINO: Near the end of Abundant Earth you write that no art museum could ever rival a forest unless the museum’s walls began breathing. EILEEN CRIST: It’s been said — I think it was Paul Ehrlich — that nobody would ever dream of bulldozing the Louvre in order to build a parking lot in its place. But how many forests have been felled for cars and livestock feed? How many breathing trees? LEATH TONINO: With regard to “waking up” from the trance of human supremacy, what do young people, specifically, need to know? Do you have a dream curriculum, a pedagogy for the future? EILEEN CRIST: One thing that children and young people (and the rest of us) need to get away from is the constant and prolonged exposure to screens. Life in front of devices is linked to attention-deficit disorder, depression, and, of course, naturedeficit disorder. The screens are running people’s lives. Just as Henry David Thoreau said, people “have become the tools of their tools.” Also, learning environmental history is indispensable in order to see that an impoverished world, taken over by one species, is not normal. No matter how painful, young people need to understand the damage we have done. Challenging the normality of the status quo also frees us to imagine an altogether different future. Another thing that bears repeating is that children have a natural sense of wonder about living beings and nature. This sense of wonder must be kept alive and cultivated through education and an outdoors curriculum. In an ecological civilization — that is, a society not oriented toward competition, social success, and materialism — the role of education is to cultivate each person’s talent or deep personal inclination. We need to help children find what that is and be able to pursue it as their life’s work. LEATH TONINO: Hopefully something other than domination! You write, “Humanity will not advance by taking over the biosphere, but, on the contrary, will stagnate in the debased identity of the colonizer.” What is it about domination that is so destructive? EILEEN CRIST: When you dominate, you cannot win. You lose no matter how things turn out. Look at the message of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The protagonist thought he could become king by killing the current king and instead lost everything: Continued on page 26 www.spiritofchange.org
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David Doubilet
THE CONSEQUENCES OF HUMAN PLUNDER continued from page 25 the respect of others, his self-respect, his wife, his friends, and ultimately his life. We have to understand that we cannot perpetrate a mass extinction and come out winners. Mass extinction will not “kill the planet,” but it will impoverish it irrevocably. That knowledge will weigh heavily on the human soul. Even if humanity survives an anthropogenic mass-extinction event, even if humans go live on Mars or fully subjugate Earth by technological means, the question will never be evaded: Who will we become if we exterminate, en masse, our nonhuman cohorts? We cannot pass on to our descendants that burden of sorrow by not paying attention to this catastrophe now. Instead, we must embrace the idea of Earth citizenship and disavow the identity of conqueror and master. This is the consciousness shift that’s needed. After that comes the practical work of scaling down the human enterprise, economically and demographically, and pulling back from large portions of nature. LEATH TONINO: Can we ever fully dominate the world? No matter how many wrecking balls we swing, isn’t the world still the big boss, calling the shots? EILEEN CRIST: Ultimately yes, nature calls the shots. The forces of Earth’s big systems, like the hydrosphere and the climate, are way bigger than we are. But the side effects of our actions are sometimes delayed, so humans can think for a while — even for a long while — that we dominate, that we are in control. But when climate change hits home, and when wild fish and coral reefs give way to an ocean of plastic, humanity will find out that our domination was a hollow illusion. In the meantime, domination destroys precious things that cannot be recovered. It hurts beings and disrespects the inherent order of the world. It not only impoverishes nature but produces a world of fear, in which most wild animals avoid us. It also disenchants the world, making it monotonous, less diverse, and more barren of life. At the same time that domination does so much harm to the other, it also disgraces humans by making us mindless and callous. Factory farms and industrial fishing are 26 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
ugly ways to provide food, unethical and ecologically destructive, and they demean humanity profoundly. LEATH TONINO: You quote John Rodman, the political theorist and radical environmentalist: “The ecology movement, to the extent that its central worry is the rapid extinction of ecological diversity, is essentially a resistance movement against the imperialism of human monoculture, roughly analogous to the earlier resistance movements against particular totalitarian regimes.” Nobody thinks it’s crazy when a group of resistance fighters take up arms against their oppressors — it seems rather sensible. But to do so on behalf of nature is seen as the craziest form of ecoterrorism. Do you see a need for violent resistance in the future? EILEEN CRIST: I think John Rodman was entirely correct. Resistance against oppression of humans is widely embraced. What is not yet recognized is the legitimacy of resisting the oppression of nonhumans and the natural world. That oppression is a form of colonialism. Rodman and others have called nature colonialism the last bastion of colonialism. I am partial to [writer and environmental activist] Wendell Berry’s definition of colonialism: destroying one place to be extravagant somewhere else. This is a straightforward description of our way of life. We are destroying large swaths of the planet to be extravagant somewhere else. Soybeans grown in the Amazon to feed pigs in China. Oil-palm plantations in Southeast Asia for added palm oil in packaged foods everywhere. The tall-grass prairie sacrificed for animal feed, biofuels, and corn syrup. Mangroves for cheap shrimp. Continental shelves for cheap fish. Coming next: seabed habitats for lithium batteries. The list is endless, and it will be ongoing unless we recognize what it’s all about, which is that our way of life is based on nature colonialism. When enough people see that, there will be a chance to transform how we live. On the question of violent resistance, I do not believe in it. When has violence not perpetuated violence? Nonviolent action is powerful. It has soul presence. It is centered and filled with equanimity and righteousness. If it is quashed with Continued on page 28
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SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 27
billion. This figure is for a human population enjoying roughly a European standard of living, sustained by organic food production, and eating far less fish, meat, and violence, it exposes the violators as being in the wrong. Nonviolent action also animal products than the average Western consumer. exemplifies another way to be in the world. Nonviolent action is both the means and Of course, there is no “optimal” population number in an absolute sense, because the end. a lot depends on the level of consumption people gravitate toward, their dietary Having said that, I do not see activists’ rescuing factory-farmed and other abused choices, and unknown variables having to do with technological developments. But 2 animals as violent action, even if it involves breaking and entering. I think the torture billion is more optimal than where we are now and where we are headed. Two billion of animals is an egregious violation that deserves a direct-action response. Rescuing is what the global population was about a hundred years ago. It is a big-enough animals from violence is nonviolent action. number to enable a connected global civilization to continue, with achievements in LEATH TONINO: What are some alternatives to our present civilization? What the sciences, humanities, technology, and so on. In other words, 2 billion can sustain would an “ecological civilization,” as you call it, look like? a lively “conversation of humanity. ” But it’s a low-enough number to enable the EILEEN CRIST: The human system, especially settlements and food-production substantial protection of nature that we are discussing. areas, should inhabit a modest portion of Earth rather than claiming the lion’s share. According to Cornell agronomist [the late] David Pimentel and Free nature, or wilderness, will be the sea within which his colleagues, 2 billion people is the estimated number that can be human habitats are nestled like islands. sustained on organic, diversified, mostly regional agriculture, with For that to happen, our consumption patterns and waste If we want to address mass farm animals living on the land and people eating a mostly plantoutput must be substantially lowered. One means of achieving based diet. This way of eating would not only be wholesome for this is lowering the human population. This can be done by extinction, we have to find people but good for the planet and for all other animals as well. investing in women’s empowerment, educating girls and young You might say: “Fine, 2 billion sounds good, but how do we get a different way of life. We women, and bringing family-planning services everywhere. there?” We get there by fast-tracking two important human rights: We also have to change the economic system — slow it down, One, full gender equity and schooling for all girls, through at least have to scrutinize human so we produce much less. We need to get rid of superfluous, secondary education. And, two, affordable and accessible familyluxury, and throwaway goods. What is produced must be made expansionism: the endless planning services for all. If we could bring the global fertility durable, fixable, recyclable, and biodegradable. We also need rate — voluntarily: I do not support coercion of any kind — to to pull back our presence from large areas of nature. Minimize expansion of our numbers, an average of one child per woman, the human population would infrastructure spread. Setting nature free on a vast scale will start to approach 2 billion within four generations. enable the diversity, complexity, and abundance of life to return. our consumption, our LEATH TONINO: The ecophilosopher Arne Næss said that Human beings will have an equitable standard of living that he was pessimistic about the twenty-first century but optimistic is modest but high-quality, with nutritious food, clean rivers, infrastructure, our use about the twenty-second. How do you think about the future? ancient forests, and abundant wildlife. Let us imagine human EILEEN CRIST: What Næss meant, I think, is that in the of the lands and seas. life within a verdant and lively world. Wild nonhumans will twenty-first century there will be a reckoning with how we’ve be respected and allowed to live free, while domestic farm lived, what we’ve done to the planet and ourselves, and that animals will be allowed natural and long lives. The planet is reckoning will set in motion an awakening: a different way to go about things, a our ground, and an ecological civilization will be in loving alignment with all its beings different relationship between Earth and humanity. It’s quite possible that things will and processes. play out that way — get bad, then better. In some respects it’s an optimistic prophecy. LEATH TONINO: The best conservation science — and this includes a 2019 report But obviously there’s no guarantee that the future will follow this trajectory. We don’t from the United Nations — is calling for half the planet to be set aside as biodiversity even know where we are with respect to climate change. If runaway heating happens preserves. What are your thoughts on this 50 percent idea? — or a nuclear war or some other unimaginable disruption — this trajectory that Næss EILEEN CRIST: The proposal to protect 50 percent of Earth’s area of land and seas outlines will be impossible. is inspiring. It’s known as Nature Needs Half, or the Half-Earth Project. It is bold, I try to avoid predictions, because the future always manages to surprise. That said, visionary, and necessary. It was an idea first formulated in the early 1990s, and it is we can and should talk about certain trends and where those trends are likely taking gaining attention and traction today. us. For example, follow the population graphs, and then ask: What does it look like if Large-scale nature conservation is a low-tech and, if embraced by humanity, there are 10 billion of us on the planet, all trying to fill our bellies? What does it look eminently doable approach to addressing the planet’s dire predicament. The only way like for people in different countries, at different latitudes? What does it look like for to stem the extinction crisis is generous protection of habitat. This will enable the wolves and monkeys and forests and seas? preservation of viable populations of animals and plants and sustain the integrity of We can’t predict the future, but it’s more useful to focus on the past anyway. ecologies like rivers, grasslands, forests, deep seas, and coral reefs. It’s not just about It’s the past that has delivered us to this present moment, which we’re trying to large size but also connectivity, to enable animal movement. understand and navigate. One thing to note about the past is that human supremacy Large-scale nature conservation is also a profoundly effective way to counter has been a constant since the emergence of agriculture. I like to envision human climate upheaval. Scientists are calling this approach “natural climate solutions,” supremacy as a baton that’s been handed forward for millennia: from the Neolithic and it is so important. Protected and restored forests, grasslands, and wetlands village to classical antiquity to Judeo-Christian and Muslim cultures to our modern can sequester substantial amounts of carbon. Additionally, phasing out industrial mechanistic era. By coming to understand this past, we can begin to understand that agriculture will help mitigate climate breakdown. our current struggle isn’t simply to expedite an energy transition, to save some acres When we think of conservation, our mind often goes to the land. I want to and wildlife here and there, or even to stave off the extinction of Homo sapiens. To emphasize the imperative to protect the ocean and restore its abundance of marine put it accurately, our struggle is to change the course of history. To break with our life: from the microscopic plankton that make so much of the planet’s oxygen, to the history. To drop the baton. krill, to the masses of small prey fish, to the big fish, mammals, reptiles, and sea birds.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF HUMAN PLUNDER continued from page 26
We have lost touch with the inherent richness of marine life, which industrial fishing, especially, has decimated. Large-scale protection of 50 percent or more of the ocean will support the restoration of the sea’s abundance of life. Of course, we must also hasten to deal with climate change. Otherwise, we will lose most of the world’s coral reefs, which harbor so much of the sea’s biodiversity. LEATH TONINO: You said earlier that there are approximately 7.8 billion humans on the planet. What would be an ideal number of humans? EILEEN CRIST: Many analysts are thinking of a provisional goal of around 2 28 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
“Our Great Reckoning: The Consequences of Human Plunder” interview with Eileen Crist by Leath Tonino originally appeared in the December 2020 issue of The Sun. Copyright © 2020 by Leath Tonino. Leath Tonino is a freelance writer and the author of two essay collections: “The Animal One Thousand Miles Long,” about adventures in Vermont, and “The West Will Swallow You,” about adventures in the American West.
www.spiritofchange.org
SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 29
PROJECT DRAWDOWN:
By Cher Gilmore
DAVID DOUBILET
100 Climate Solutions in Real Time
Lion photo projected onto the Vatican during the 2015 COP 21 international climate conference by film director Louis Psihoyos, who aims to get 10% of the population aware of the extinction crisis through his films such as “Racing Extinction.” www.opsociety.org.
I
t’s easy to get depressed and feel helpless in the face of the cascading effects of climate change we’re experiencing today: mega-wildfires, extreme heat and drought, flooding, hurricanes on steroids, and melting ice caps, to name a few. However, it’s not hopeless; we can change the trajectory of our future if we make the right choices individually and together — beginning today. Back in 2017, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming was published. Edited by environmentalist and best-selling author Paul Hawken, the book presents 100 different ecologically sound ways to “draw down” carbon from the atmosphere by working in cooperation with natural systems. This was the first product of Project Drawdown, which was co-founded in 2014 by Hawken and fellow-environmentalist Amanda Joy Ravenhill to uncover the most substantive climate solutions and communicate them to the world. Drawdown refers to the to the time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline, thereby stopping catastrophic climate change. Before Project Drawdown, the most widely stated climate goals were to slow down or stop greenhouse gas emissions, but to Hawken these were necessary but insufficient goals. “If you’re traveling down the wrong road, you are still on the wrong road if you slow down,” he opined. The only goal that makes sense is to reverse global warming, he believed — and there was no roadmap for that. Project Drawdown was the answer. The solutions presented in the book and on the website were sourced from individual farms, communities, cities, companies and governments. A coalition of researchers and scientists selected those with the greatest potential to either reduce emissions or draw down and store carbon from the atmosphere, reviewed the literature on each solution, and devised climate and financial models for each. Then outside experts evaluated their work. Both book and website are organized into eight sections: Energy, Food, Women and Girls, Buildings and Cities, Land Use, Transport, Materials, and Coming Attractions; and
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every solution contains information on its history and science, examples, a ranking in terms of its global emissions-reduction potential, an estimate of how many gigatons of greenhouse gases it avoids or removes from the atmosphere, and its costs. Who would have guessed that refrigerant management would be in the top ten? Or that educating girls and family planning would be the second most important things we could do to reduce carbon emissions? It turns out that hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs, the primary current refrigerant) have 1,000 to 9,000 times greater capacity to warm the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. As for making the means of family planning more accessible and educating girls, these two rights-based solutions are projected to reduce the future global population by about a billion people, with commensurate savings in greenhouse gas emissions. It’s hopeful to see so many natural solutions already in practice, but even more hopeful to see how many of them we can individually affect. For instance, we can all reduce the amount of food we waste (the #1 emissions saver), we can add more plant-based food to our diets and reduce our intake of meat (#3), and we can see that our old refrigerators and air conditioners are recycled properly (#4). And those SUVs? Last year the International Energy Agency found that SUVs were the second largest cause of the global rise in carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade! An analysis commissioned by The Guardian found that all the SUVs sold in the U.S. just in 2018 will in one year emit 3.5 million tons more in CO2 than if they were smaller cars. Over a 15-year lifetime of the vehicles, the extra pollution is on par with the entire annual emissions of Norway—a huge hit to the climate. This year Project Drawdown published their latest update — the Drawdown 2020 Review — available for free download from their website. Their bottom line: the world can still reach Drawdown by mid-century, if we make the best use of all existing climate solutions. Ultimately, we can build a completely regenerative society, because when we implement natural solutions to solve the climate emergency, we produce a plethora of added benefits to human and planetary well-being — such as clean air and water, more nutritious food, less disease, and more productive and meaningful jobs.
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An Ecosystem Restoration Camp project, Reforest Now trains people how to restore biodiversity and works to reforest cleared and remnant rainforest areas in New South Wales, Australia. It was featured in “Drawdown 2020—The Time is Now.”
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The main challenge with the Drawdown solutions is that scaling them up will require international cooperation and coordination at unprecedented levels — and that depends on our leaders seeing global warming as the existential threat it is and acting with the requisite speed and determination. Achieving the needed global transformation will require a new paradigm of cooperation, a vision of possibility, and the collective will to address the issue. Project Drawdown has produced a framework to guide us on a new pathway of ecological recovery and sustainability, Ocean farmer Bren Smith, founder of but to act, we need to be able to touch, see, GreenWave cranks the kelp line just before and feel the existing solutions at hand. In harvesting in clips from “Drawdown 2020— “Drawdown 2020 — The Time is Now,” The Time is Now.” Ocean farming is important the virtual event that introduced Climate for climate change because oceans soak up Week in New York City in September, 30 percent of our CO2. 2020, we experience the sight, sound, and feel of just a few of those solutions, and watching it for free on the website is electrifying. There is so much in this inspiring presentation that one can get overwhelmed with possibility! At the end, clips of Academy Award-winning filmmaker Louis Psihoyos’ film “Racing Extinction” were shown as they were being projected onto the Empire State Building and then on the Vatican during the COP 21 international climate conference, creating 4.4 billion media impressions worldwide. Psihoyos says that “Once you get 10 percent of the population 100% committed to a cause, it’s unstoppable.” With his films he aims to get 10 percent of the planet aware of the extinction crisis, and he’ll be doing similar projections of his film on iconic buildings worldwide in 2021. Project Drawdown ultimately is a response to environmentalist Rachel Carson’s pioneering work beginning in the 1960s: “The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery — not over nature but of ourselves.” Rather than feeling climate change is something that’s happening to us, Paul Hawken asks us to consider that “global warming is happening for us — an atmospheric transformation that inspires us to change and re-imagine everything we make and do.” If we do that, he says, we begin to live in a different world.
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Cher Gilmore is a community organizer, writer, and editor living in Southern California. She believes that addressing climate change is the number one requirement for human survival, and spends most of her time organizing around and writing about this issue. For a full inspirational experience, consider taking in the recording of “Drawdown 2020 — The Time is Now,” under News and Events on drawdown.org. www.spiritofchange.org
SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 31
5G —
Environmental Health Threat, Economic Boon or Both?
5G
By Katie Alvord
T
he rollout of 5th generation wireless technology, aka 5G, has begun amidst more debate over safety, wrote Christopher Ketcham in The New Republic in May, 2020. Those promoting 5G argue for its economic benefits and say there’s no reason to assume it’s unsafe. Opponents counter we shouldn’t presume 5G’s safety and we could have reasons for concern. 5G employs previously lesser-used frequencies called millimeter, or mm waves, which don’t travel far or easily penetrate walls or trees. The new technology’s transmitters are generally closely spaced, every few hundred feet at the curb outside homes and businesses. 5G will be added to and integrated with 3G and 4G systems instead of replacing them. The planned addition of 5G’s close-range antennas alongside existing wireless infrastructure is raising fears that RFR [radio frequency radiation] exposure will increase significantly due to more densely packed antennas. Research indicates mm waves penetrate only top layers of skin, but affect sweat glands more than other tissues. They might have systemic effects via circulatory or nervous system connections from skin to other organs. So far, prolonged exposures to low-intensity mm waves have not been extensively studied. Physicians and scientists from over 40 countries — concerned over sparse 5G research, coupled with studies showing RFR harm — are calling for a 5G moratorium. At the same time, many business and agency statements about 5G suggest that it’s safe enough to deploy without further study. When U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked wireless industry and FCC representatives whether independent research had been done on 5G’s impacts on health and environment, they responded that as far as they knew no safety testing had been done. As agencies and industry advance 5G and promote its economic benefits, some groups have pushed back. In 2018, 19 tribal governments, the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the FCC after it issued an order to eliminate federal environmental impact review requirements for 5G.
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In 2020, the complainants won their case and reaffirmed that 5G facilities can’t be built without National Environmental Protection Act compliance. This win might help the more than 130 mostly-local U.S. groups and communities that have been fighting 5G. Some locations — like Los Altos Hills, California, Easton, Connecticut and Hawaii County, Hawaii — have taken steps to limit 5G expansion. The city of Boston recently asked that the FCC review possible 5G health impacts to ensure safety of these technologies. In 2019, New Hampshire formed a commission to review 5G safety. After expanding its scope to all wireless tech over a year of study, the commission released its report on November 1, 2020. Among 15 recommendations endorsed by 10 of 13 commission members are: • Require appropriate state agencies to disseminate wireless health and safety information. • Place warning signs near 5G antennas in public rightsof-way. • Shift schools and libraries from Wi-Fi to hard-wired connections within five years of getting funding. • Ask the FCC for an environmental impact statement on “the effect on New Hampshire and the country as a whole from the expansion of RF wireless technologies.” Will state officials adopt these recommendations? Will other states follow New Hampshire’s lead? A report on wireless tech health effects, particularly in schools, is expected from the Oregon Health Authority early this year, and Massachusetts has been considering formation of both a 5G task force and a wireless safety commission. Outcomes of these policy actions bear watching. For a more thorough set of science-based recommendations, see “Minimizing EMF Risk,” Chapter 12, in Overpowered: What Science Tells Us About the Dangers of Cell Phones and Other Wi-Fi-Age Devices by Martin Blank, PhD. A longtime member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, Katie Alvord is an award-winning freelance writer whose work has appeared in a range of publications. She has also worked with and written for libraries, government agencies and nonprofit groups, and is the author of “Divorce Your Car!” Reprinted with permission of the author from SEJournal Online, Vol. 6, No. 1. www.sej.org.
HOW TO REDUCE YOUR OWN POTENTIAL WIRELESS RISKS • Use cabled computers and corded landlines for as much work as possible.
• If you have wireless connections at home, turn them off when not in use, especially during sleep hours. One option: Put your router on a timer to switch it off at night.
• Keep wireless devices out of your bedroom while sleeping.
• Don’t use or carry operating wireless devices
next to your body. Laptops shouldn’t go directly on your lap. Keep cellphones in packs or purses, not in shirt, pants or skirt pockets or bras.
• When on a cellphone, use the speaker
function to keep the phone away from your head. Texting instead of calling also reduces RFR exposure.
• Put cell phones in “airplane” mode when using
non-communication functions such as an alarm clock or cameras.
• When reviewing lengthy electronic documents, download first, then read offline with Wi-Fi off.
• Consider opting out of utility smart meters and retaining analog meters, especially if meters are close to your bedroom or workspace.
MASSACHUSETTS FOR SAFE TECHNOLOGY ALERT
Federal judges are investigating the FCC’s failure to assess the safety of current radiation exposure limits. They are taking this case seriously. To learn what is happening with public policy town-by-town in MA, and join the safe technology conversation visit MA4SafeTech.org
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Recognition of the vivaxis acknowledges Earth as a complex living being that communicates with receptors in the human energy field.
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few years back, I went hiking in Dogtown with a friend and our dogs. As soon as we reached the woods, the dogs bolted ahead, and in running after them, we became hopelessly lost. Unfortunately for me, but fortunate for us that day, I am sensitive to frequencies from telecommunications infrastructure, towers, and antennas, particularly on the site of a previous injury on the left side of my head and body. At the beginning of our walk, I had noticed (and felt) a large number of antennas mounted on the water tower near our parked car, so to help find our way back I began systematically turning my head and following the trails in the direction of the most discomfort, realizing that the dogs were also helping us navigate in that direction. Hours later we found the car…and I had a massive headache for days. On that afternoon, I used an injured part of my body and energy field to find my way. But according to researcher Francis Nixon and her student Judy Jacka, humans are, in fact, endowed with an energetic signature that marks the place where an individual is born. Francis Nixon named the phenomenon the vivaxis, meaning the “axis of life.” Does it make sense that before humans relied on satellite-enabled GPS systems, our ancestors who were the most resilient and who survived the demands of challenging environments were also the ones who had the best-developed navigational skills? And what if those skills were not just intellectual, such as navigating by the stars, but were also housed in the energy body itself as another inborn physical sensory system, designed by nature, to help ensure our survival and ability to find our way home? Do humans, like other animals, possess a forgotten inborn navigation sensory system? In her Vivaxis Manual, Part 1, Frances Nixon writes, “The radiation energies of Earth form a massive network of energy waves traveling in both horizontal and vertical directions. When a fetus is subjected to these energy waves or currents, it pulls the horizontal and vertical energies into a common axis or point. The fetus then becomes magnetized to that exact geophysical point, and a permanent magnetic pattern or alignment is introduced into the atomic structure of the bones as they solidify. It is thought that the baby’s vivaxis is generally created about the time of the mother’s first labor pains and is approximately the size of the fetus just prior to birth. This same dynamic is replayed throughout all creation.”1 Francis Nixon’s work was synthesized by her student Judy Jackma in her book The Vivaxis Connection. Energy medicine teacher Donna Eden, who possesses the ability to see energy, also noticed that some clients would become weak when faced in a particular direction. Using magnets, she synthesized a simple technique to test a person’s response to the energy field in all directions, as well as to demagnetize a compromised vivaxis, which she demonstrates in videos and describes in her book Energy Medicine.2 Recognition of the vivaxis acknowledges Earth as a complex living being that communicates with receptors in the human energy field and that supports transcendent balance and health. Current economic growth is riding hard on a wave of techno-optimism, as well as a sense of entitlement to what Vandana Shiva refers to as “the Commons,” which are communal resources that belong to us all. Already there are plans for launching nuclear power on both the
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moon and Mars, while back on Earth the launching of 5G telecommunications requires the installation at increased densities of microwave antennas on light poles in neighborhoods, with no biological-based safety testing or monitoring for this increased exposure. The plight of individuals already ill or disabled due to wireless exposures has been denied and ignored in favor of affirming the manifest destiny of industrial and economic interests. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find places that are free of wireless exposure, as even sensitive environments like Mount Everest and Yellowstone are being blanketed with microwave antennas to meet the market’s demands for infinite coverage and faster downloads. Higher elevations, including mountaintops and rooftops, are among the most desirable infrastructure settings for the industry. Juxtaposed against humanity’s pursuit of increasing transmitting sensors to generate more data to power smart devices to create artificial intelligence are the extraordinary sensory capacities within the human energy field and all of nature. These inborn sensory systems, including the vivaxis of each individual, are sounding the alarm that the artificial, man-made electromagnetic environment is becoming uninhabitable. Within these sensory systems — codified through observation alone by earlier cultures, including the meridians of Oriental medicine and the layers of the auric field — are rhythms that choreograph radiant health. From when to eat to when to sleep to which herbs to harvest at the full moon, modern culture has become further and further removed from chronobiology and harmony with nature as the basis of a balanced life. Artificial frequencies are scrambling the healthy synthesis of the life force. Rudolph Steiner cautioned that technology would usher in an age where individuals are increasingly detached from their soul forces. German blogger Michael Berstecher explains, “Our cell metabolism, our nervous system, and the pineal gland are optimally electromagnetically stimulated by the imperceptible and subtle impulses of nature — especially the Schumann-resonances and Sferics. Our physical organism wants and needs to ‘hear’ these frequencies in order to…experience inner peace, bliss and love as a state of consciousness. Nowadays, artificial radio waves, trillions of times more powerful than those found in nature, are superimposed upon natural electromagnetic stimulation fields severing all beings from nature’s electromagnetic conductors.”3 Artificial intelligence lacks connection to the intelligence of nature. As we have outsourced the collection, analysis and application of global information to a concentrated elite who already have chosen to override the canaries in the coal mine — those who are reporting harm to themselves and/or nature from these wireless technologies — we place ourselves at great risk of further separation from the brilliant intelligence, as well as Earth stewardship responsibilities, that are our birthright. A yogi master said, “All the ailments that human beings suffer are simply because we have lost the awareness of how to be in sync is preferred with the forces that are making us who we are.” Like biodynamic gardening, a form of regenerative agriculture that recognizes a reverence for all land, water, food, plants, animals and people, we need to choose communications that harmonize with the whole ecosystem. Our physiology is wired to take us there and to bring us back home again and again.
LEARN MORE
• The 5G International Legal Action Network seeks to head off a global catastrophe from the onslaught 5G/ AI/IOT/80,000+ satellites by skillful means of law and legal process, and offers the Declaration supporting the Healthy Heaven Trust's "Petition for Emergency/Expedited Rulemaking" to the FCC. https://www.5g-ilan.com/hhti-declaration • An international emergency appeal that you can join to stop 5G on Earth and in space is made to the world’s governments by scientists, doctors, environmental organizations and others at https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/ • Explore the environmental price tag for global wi-fi and 5G to Earth and all life at www.freethesky.org • Stop5GInternational.org serves as clearing house to provide education and raise awareness about 5G technology, including WORLD PROTEST DAY events scheduled around the globe for March 21, 2021.
NOTES
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1. Frances Nixon, “Vivaxis Manual, Part 1,” British Columbia, Canada: Magnetic Publishers 1975. 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K4D0-zdryY 3. https://stop5ginternational.org/to-all-searching-hearts-longing-for-inner-peace-bliss-and-love-as-astate-of-consciousness/ SI N
CE
34 Spirit 34 Spirit of of Change Change || SPRING/SUMMER SPRING/SUMMER 2021 2021
Patricia Burke works with Stop5G International, MA4SafeTechnology, and other groups worldwide calling for increased regulation of wireless technologies, with a focus on human rights, environmental justice, and the rights of nature. She can be reached at stopsmartmetersMass@gmail.com.
REPRINT FROM SEPT/OCT 2001 SPIRIT OF CHANGE MAGAZINE
g f o n r the Spirit of Place i s w o D
INTERVIEW WITH SIG LONEGREN
by Susan Meeker-Lowry
S
ig Lonegren, M.A. is a dowser living in Glastonbury, England. Before moving “across the big pond” he lived in Vermont, where he served as Selectman for Greensboro in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, trustee of the American Society of Dowsers (ASD), and former head of their dowsing school. He also founded the ASD's first Earth Mysteries Group. He is the founder of The School of Mid-Atlantic Geomancy which offers an intensive, eight-month certification program in Modern European Geomancy, and the author of several books, including The Pendulum Kit, Spiritual Dowsing, and Labyrinths: Ancient Myths & Modern Uses. He is a trustee of The Chalice Well in Glastonbury and a council member of the British Society of Dowsers. [Sig currently resides in the Netherlands and can be reached at sig@ geomancy.org. — Ed.] Sig was first exposed to dowsing by his mother forty years ago when she taught him to dowse with wire coat hangers using his home's underground water pipe as a target. But it wasn't until the summer solstice of 1970 that he realized dowsing was his life work. His mother had taken him to see the sunrise over a standing stone in central Vermont. The previous evening Sig had listened to master dowser Terry Ross and archeo-astronomer Byron Dix talking about energy leys, megalithic astronomy, and the like, all of which were new concepts. The next morning, instead of watching the sunrise with everyone else, Sig found himself repeatedly drawn to an earth-covered stone chamber on the site. He gave in to the compulsion and sat against the back wall, looking out the door. Sig recounts: “Suddenly there were twenty-two other people inside the chamber with me. They had just simply materialized. They had white skin and some had beards. They wore white toga-like garments, and were sitting cross-legged on the floor in a regular pattern.” To Sig's astonishment, he found he was sharing the same space with one of the men. “I was he. I felt literally at one with these beings.” Just as he was thinking how cool the vision was, it vanished. But it left him with the deep knowing that those chambers, and ultimately geomancy, were to be his path. www.spiritofchange.org
I spoke with Sig in April at his home on Bove Town Road in Glastonbury. His house is aptly named “Sunny Bank.” It is painted bright, sunny yellow and has a fantastic hillside garden in its small, walled backyard complete with a replica of The Chalice Well's fountain. Although it was early spring, the garden was graced with flowers and vines already in bloom. Bove Town (so named because it is a“bove” town) is narrow and steep. From the back garden you can see the town of Glastonbury nestled at the base of the Tor. SUSAN MEEKER-LOWRY: What is the dowsing state like? Is it like meditation? SIG LONEGREN: Dowsing's brain wave activity resembles that of yogis, and I am heretical enough to argue that dowsing brings the things that meditation brings to you, only more quickly. Dowsing causes you to get to that brain wave point very quickly, while meditation is a slower introduction into that space. I think dowsing is meditation. SUSAN MEEKER-LOWRY: But you're starting in a different place? SIG LONEGREN: With dowsing you always start with your left brain. You always start with the “right question,” which is a left brain function. There are four different kinds of brain activity: beta, which is ordinary consciousness; alpha, which is a light trance state; theta, the dream state and when rapid eye movement occurs; and delta, which is deep, deep sleep. That's basically how it divides out. When you're dowsing, what's happening is the left hemisphere is functioning in beta asking the right questions, which is absolutely critical. Meanwhile there's a flare-up down in delta looking for the answer in the deep unconscious. It's a pattern that you can see both in dowsers and in yogis. It's what I call “gnowing” [pronounced with a hard "g," as in gum.] Gnowing is honoring and using both hemispheres of the brain equally so that you do your rational best and your intuitive best. I believe this is the way forward. The thing about dowsing is that every time you want to ask a question on the other side, you have to come back here [points to left brain] to ask it. It makes you work the path.
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Continued on page 36 SPRING/SUMMER 2021 2021 || Spirit Spirit of of Change Change 35 9 SPRING/SUMMER 9
Dowsing
Continued from page 35
Dowsing is a tool that can help you go very safely over to the other side and back. SUSAN MEEKER-LOWRY: Can you talk a bit about asking the right question? SIG LONEGREN: Well, Susan's asked me to come to her house to locate water for a well. Where's the nearest water? Oh, it's right over here, fifteen feet from the house. But it's nine hundred feet down, it goes dry from June to October every year, and it tastes like sulfur. I asked where's the nearest water and that's what I got. It wasn't the right question. Let's try again. We're using a backhoe with arms that only go nineteen feet or so down. So, we're looking for water that's less than nineteen feet down. We're a typical American household, so we need five gallons a minute. We want good, potable water and we want it to run year round. Now we've got the right question: Where's the nearest water that's less than twenty feet down, runs year round at over five gallons a minute, and is good, potable water? There's a very literal aspect to the unconscious. SUSAN MEEKER-LOWRY: What is the difference between dowsing and geomancy? SIG LONEGREN: Dowsing is best known as a tool for locating underground veins of water, oil, lost objects, missing persons, etc. It is also a tool for spiritual growth and intuition. Geomancy comes from “geo” — Gaia, Earth, — and “mancy” —divination of. Geomancy: divination of Earth. As with astrology, which works with power points in time, geomancy works with power points of place. The purpose of a geomancer is to work for harmony on Earth, fertility of Earth, and to create spaces that enhance the possibility that whatever you're trying to do there happens. Geomancers are, in essence, what I would call spiritual ecologists. SUSAN MEEKER-LOWRY: The energy you work with is already there or not? SIG LONEGREN: I've been involved in geomancy for thirty-five years. For the first thirty of those I would have said the energy was there first. I'm not so sure anymore. What we're finding in the latest work with labyrinths, which are single-pathed magical tools, is that if you put it in the best place you can find, given the limitations of the site — a backyard for instance — water will come to it. There are two kinds of underground water: “water table” water that hydrologists are interested in, and primary, or juvenile, water. Primary water doesn't come from rainwater. It is created down in our Mom's belly as a by-product of various chemical reactions. Then it is forced under great pressure towards the surface of Earth, but most of the time it never gets there. Instead, it comes up through a neck, which dowsers in the U.S. call a “dome,” or a “blind spring” in Britain. When it reaches an impermeable layer of rock or clay, the water goes out as veins at different depths. From above, this dome might look like a spider with an odd number of legs coming out of it. You find these dome features in sacred space, and it is this water that is drawn to labyrinths. Occasionally a vein of primary water does reach the surface. These places are considered sacred and are places of healing and contemplation. The water from the Chalice Well, here in Glastonbury, for instance, is primary water. The Well has been considered a sacred place by ancient people and Christians alike. It has never run dry, even in droughts, and the temperature and flow are constant year round. Chalice Well water is chalybeate in nature — rich in iron — which is why it was called the Blood Spring in ancient times. This is the result of the chemical process that created the water. SUSAN MEEKER-LOWRY: You were saying that it appears people have the ability to draw primary water to a place. I've seen ley line maps of Glastonbury that are amazing. There are so many lines coming directly into the area and leading to the Tor. Do you think ancient people had a role in that or do you think they were picking up on what was already there? SIG LONEGREN: First some terminology. A “ley” is an alignment of sacred sites and is the result of our ancestors locating their holy sites over primary water, which is yin energy. Many, but not all, of these leys have energy leys flowing along them. Energy leys are straight beams of yang energy six to eight feet wide and, like a river, they have a direction of flow. A “power center” is a place where domes and veins of primary water and energy leys come together. They are where the yin and the yang, the female and male intersect. Sacred sites are not “hot,” or at their peak performance all the time. It's a cyclical thing and this is where astrology and geomancy come together. For instance, Stonehenge is hottest on the summer solstice sunrise. Now to answer your question. I would go with John Michell's theory, which is discussed in his book Earth Spirit. When we were hunter/gatherers following the animals from the valleys up into the mountains on a seasonal cycle, we were naturally at power places when they were at their hottest point. It wasn't something we had to think about. You could say Gaia led us to the right places at the right times. Then when we became farmers and settled in the valleys, we needed to work with the energy centers where we were. We had to find 36 Spirit Spirit of of Change Change || SPRING/SUMMER SPRING/SUMMER 2021 2021
ways to enhance Earth’s energies when they weren't at their peak. I think that's when geomancy got going. There does seem to be a solid connection between farming and the first permanent temples built on sacred space. And there's certainly evidence that culture after culture built on the same places. So power places can be enhanced and even created over time when people consciously work with Earth’s energies. You don't just build a labyrinth, for instance; you have to walk it in a conscious manner. In fact, you don't have to physically construct it at all; just go out and walk the pattern, and after a time water will come. Creating the labyrinth brings the energy leys in, too. SUSAN MEEKER-LOWRY: What attracts it? SIG LONEGREN: Well, (pats the ground) we're working with a living being who's real open to communication. SUSAN MEEKER-LOWRY: It's a very positive thing, when you think about it. You don't necessarily have to go to a sacred place that everyone recognizes as sacred. You can consciously create your own. SIG LONEGREN: Yes. And that is my mission. To be the Johnny Appleseed of sacred spaces. And to encourage more and more people to build new ones. SUSAN MEEKER-LOWRY: If I wanted to create sacred space, build a labyrinth for example, how would I go about it? How would I know where the right place was? SIG LONEGREN: There are many different elements that come into the construction of sacred space, but the basic three are Earth’s energies, the astronomical relevance (like Stonehenge and the summer solstice), and the geometry of what you're building. I would encourage people who are interested in this to get in touch with the American Society of Dowsers and take a dowsing course. But the basic process goes like this: First ask yourself, “Why am I building this? Do I want a lawn ornament or a place to do healing or meditate more effectively?” After your purpose is clear, decide the shape. Different shapes seem to enhance different energies. Then you need to identify where you can't build. For instance, if you want a thirty-five foot labyrinth, which is pretty standard, and you want it on your lawn, there are only so many places it can go. Once you have identified the most appropriate place, it's time to dowse for the center. At this point I would find some way to communicate with the spirit of place. You might bring a gift, maybe something to tie on the branch of a nearby tree. Then take a moment to calm down and tell this spirit what you have in mind, and ask it to work with you to make this a place of meditation, healing, or whatever you have in mind. Now, using a pendulum or an L-rod, stand somewhere on your lawn and ask, “What direction is the best place for me to put the center of this labyrinth?” It will show you a line. Then go somewhere else and ask the same question again and notice where the two lines cross. That's the center. It's called triangulation. Then go to that spot and ask, “Is this the spot?” SUSAN MEEKER-LOWRY: It sounds to me that you're saying every place has the potential to be sacred space. SIG LONEGREN: That's true, although the reality seems to be that some places are more sacred than others, but every place has the potential to become sacred. There's another phenomenon I'd like to mention here. There are domes of water with no energy leys associated with them. These places have traditionally been considered negative and even harmful for humans. When dowsers in the U.S. started exploring them, they were called “noxious zones,” which when you think about it, is a putdown of Mom. The reality is, these are places of yin or feminine energy. Many animals, such as cats and cloven-hoofed animals love them. Several years ago, I decided to explore these yin areas myself. I discovered that they are like psychic vacuum cleaners, places where Mom just sucks everything down. If you sleep over one of these places, she'll suck your life force so it's not a good place to sleep. On the other hand, if you've got crap in your life, these are really good places to get rid of it. Mom takes that crap and breaks it down and takes it away. These are wonderful places for a compost pile, by the way. Think of it like this: The wheel of life is creation and growth as well as death and decomposition. There's no good or bad, just parts of the whole. I like to call these places Kali centers. They restore balance and help you get rid of crap that hinders your spiritual growth. We need to connect with Mom, and become open to the spirit of the place we call home. But it’s simple arrogance to talk about saving Earth; it’s ourselves we’re saving. So many people don’t have a clue what nature is about. We have the job of waking people up, which happens one person at a time. Geomancy is a very subversive tool in that it wakes you up to what we’re talking about: Earth is alive. Susan Meeker-Lowry is a frequent contributor to Spirit of Change. [Susan is currently the owner of GaiasGardenHerbals at etsy.com — Ed.]
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SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 37
How the Wisdom of Mentors Guided My Steps into
e r u t Na
By Sharon Powers
F
or a young adult it may seem like society expects you to be working steadily toward your higher education or career. But what if society doesn’t offer what you want to learn? Enter: self-education and seeking mentors. I am a nature lover and fondly remember sunny days with my mom enjoying the outdoors. Our family had lots of pets — a rabbit, hamsters, birds, fish, a turtle, cats, dogs and ponies. But my mom had a thing for hand-taming wild animals. You might see her sitting out on the lawn after dark coaxing a raccoon out of its hole to eat from her hand (she did this with skunks too). Or coming home from school, she’d say, “Listen, there’s a wild cat in the spare bedroom. Don’t go in there and don’t tell Dad.” On a warm afternoon we could find the honey bee’s home by painting some bright blue chalk powder on the bee’s backside with a small watercolor paintbrush, and tracking the direction and timing of its return. So cool! There was a day in winter when she had already tamed the chickadees (this takes months), and she stuck me out there on the snowy deck to experience it for the first time. I still tame chickadees today. Simply start by leaving a
38 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
“Blend with the land and celebrate life.” —Hopi glove with seed in the palm near the feeder. Begin to put very little food in the feeder so that it runs out more often. With lots of stillness and patience you can transition to sitting out there to feed. It only works with an empty feeder. And if you ever get those little chickadees tame, you can stick your favorite elder or kids out there and see some joy come alive! I grew up on the west shore of Grand Isle, Vermont, so Lake Champlain was right there. Our summers were especially amazing with freedom to roam the old cedar woods and mess around in boats. The neighbors were a very traditional farm family — three boys — and I had four brothers. With all those boys around, I was happy to pal around with a girl down the road. At the neighbor’s farm — I called it “Mary’s house” — her working kitchen was just so fascinating to me that I spent a lot of time there, so much that I kind of blended in sometimes. After all, Mary
did not have a daughter; maybe I fulfilled something for her, too. Their way of life was different from ours in that they worked the land producing so much food, and my dear stepdad commuted to his bank job. I tromped all over that farm, including the hedgerows and forest. I could see how tied to the land these folks were. There was a related man — we called him “Uncle Richard” — and he would let me tag along when he gathered big baskets of butternuts up in the hedgerow. He would let me sit and watch him clean buckets of fish from ice-fishing, which he then sold in the city. But I could only hang out with him under one condition: that I didn’t talk, just keep quiet. It was a phenomenal way to learn a skill, all good. I did keep in touch with Mary all through her old age. She lived to be 91. That’s her picture holding a chickadee. You can count yourself lucky to have a parent(s), relative
or neighbor as good first mentors. It doesn’t always work out. My mom remarried to my dear stepdad, but my blood father was an outdoor legend, a hunting and fishing guide and part Cree descendant. He lived with the Cree in northern Quebec for two years beyond any roads, and spoke the language. I met him when I was 17, but that’s a story for another time! He was my non-mentor in a way, you know? Is that why I went directly to nature to learn? My secret sit spot was on a bluff overlooking the lake 30 feet below. From there you could see so much sky and water, the distant shore. And, of course, it’s all moving with sparkling waves, the clouds and gulls flying by. Always the sounds of birds and waves, the feeling of the breezes — so enchanting. It came to me there, around age 12, that I could not identify anyone who lived in balance with the natural world. Not my family, not even the farmers next door, because they basically worked to extract resources. The forest to them was firewood, fence posts and nut harvest. I decided right there, thanks to Mother Nature, that the lifeway of Native people would guide me. In 1989 I attended a five-day residential group retreat with Sun Bear. He was a Native teacher and author of sustainability and culture books, such as The Medicine Wheel: Earth Astrology. The small gathering took place at a rural auberge near Sherbrooke, Quebec. Out of the 15 people, I was the only one besides Sun Bear who did not speak French, so he would pause in a teaching and ask me to clarify for our bilingual friends. Every day he would have us go individually out on the land to practice our new rituals and guided meditations. And each day it was for a longer time. I began to feel frustrated because, well, I already spent lots of time outdoors alone. I signed up to be with Sun Bear; was I getting my money’s worth? It was June and the woods were bursting with life. On the final day’s outing I had gone far enough in that I broke branchlets to mark my way back. My appeal and inquiry was to the Plant People, the Green Nation. I was 31, a few years into a happy marriage and a career teaching in the outdoors. My calling was botany, and I could identify plants and assess their habitats, yet something was missing. I longed to learn about the deeper nature of plants from an Earth-based elder and to see the plants through native eyes. So, on that final day I set up my four directions on a great slab of rock in the forest, and did the rituals in each direction. And something happened... It was so powerful and humbling to directly receive a message, as if by osmosis: “You call yourself a botanist. That can be so insulting, like a birdwatcher whose only goal is a check mark next to a species. Maybe you’ll come across a medicine plant with so much complexity and history with the People, and all you will know is the name. Big deal.” Gulp, what was that, I wondered?! Then this: “Green plants are the base of the whole world’s food chain. Designed to be of a giving nature, plants offer us their food and medicine, the joy of aroma and taste, the life-giving breath of oxygen, fuel for warmth, and all the building materials for our homes. Don’t forget about all the dazzling colors of flowers! Receive their gifts!” When I left the event, I knew that it was herbal medicine that would be the focus of my adult self-education, and soon thereafter met Rosemary Gladstar, to become one of her first Vermont apprentices in the Art and Science of Herbalism. Rosemary had twelve apprentices that year many moons ago. We met in her home one weekend per month for nine months. Talk about hands-on! We learned so much from invited Native elders, a primitive skills guy, and master gardeners who worked with us. There were field trips, large gatherings (like Green Nations Gathering), and one-week intensives. Rosemary allowed me to walk along to her vision quest spot on Sage Mountain. There she would stay for days with no food, just a hammock and tarp. We went higher and further, seeing fresh moose and bear signs. And back I walked, leaving a defenseless woman way, way out there. Thank you, Rosemary, for being the ultimate stepping-into-nature mentor! I had heard of a man in northern Wisconsin who took a mentor approach to outdoor education. That would be Tamarack Song, a teacher of old way skills (he calls it Clan Way or Circle Way) at the Teaching Drum Outdoor School. A number of students, or “seekers,” commit to spending most of their time for one whole year living like the old days of the traditional Ojibwe People. The school would provide the food, but otherwise it’s nature immersion. We exchanged letters over the years. My second one-week visit with Tamarack and his wife Lety was with my teenage nephew Ivan. We set up my conical travel wigwam right near the house. They had us in for breakfast. Lety spread a cloth out on the floor and set out bowls of mixed fruit salad and a variety of nuts. “We haven’t sat at a table to eat in years,” she said. On the wood stove, little tins of oil were gently warming. Tamarack was Continued on page 40 www.spiritofchange.org
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Wisdom of Mentors
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doing a study on the fats of different wildlife (obtained from roadkill), and later wrote a book about it. I spent whole summers with my nephew. We travelled with both my wigwam encampment and modern gear to step out into nature. After the Wisconsin visit, it was on to the Porcupine Mountains of the Upper Penninsula of Michigan, the largest tract of old growth forest in North America, and right on Lake Superior. For our first few nights we found a hidden spot on a high bench not too far from the parking area. We set up our hammock and tarps, made a little fireplace and it was magical. The trees are so tall, and there’s not much underbrush, so you can walk around pretty well. During our last night, just pre-dawn and not very far away, a giant tree fell down in the forest! Strange cracking sounds, a whoosh and a thud so hard you could feel it shake the ground. Whoa, it wasn’t even windy! It made us look up at the trees and branches where our camp was in a new way. Always put your camp away from the widow-maker. Still in the Porkies, we had a new plan: get a permit for the vehicle at a trailhead, then go the other way off-trail. Ha! I could see on the map a brook drainage that led a few miles right to Lake Superior. Great adventure! The walk was gorgeous — you could not keep from craning your neck upwards to see the canopy — like a living cathedral! We made it to the shore and a lovely camp spot out of any wind. We hung the food away from bears, had a great campfire and sang the eagle calling song gifted to me by a Native elder. At bedtime all is well, except I did notice the skeeters were swarming the minute one left the campfire. Hmmm... Ivan’s hammock was bombproof for bugs (made it myself) with netting and zipper built-in. Mine was a new design I was trying out. It had no zipper, but a big overlap on top. Guess what? I got bit every five minutes all night! They say the itch to go north is nothing like the itch of being there. I felt miserable in the AM. After good coffee and breakfast, we went out to the rocky shore. A bald eagle sitting nearby stayed. That day we bailed out, but the experience was worth it. Jon Young is a dedicated wilderness mentor who speaks of the value of placing yourself in wild nature — some place where man is not in control. Create a secret spot, called a “sit spot,” where you can visit fairly easily. When you spend time there in different seasons and times of day, there’s a familiarity that takes hold. You know where the plants and rock are, as familiar as your own living room. I go way back with a sit spot. With a little exploring of the wilder pockets of accessible land, you will find them! One summer day I came across a glacial boulder with an overhang so big you could stay dry on a wet day. I start bonding with the spot by being quiet and observant. For some reason I enjoy picking up the dead sticks all around; it makes it easier to move about, and it feels like woodland gardening. Into the zone, gather sticks, walk to brush pile and back. Once I looked up to find a doe standing 30 feet away watching me. I sat down and mimicked her behavior of nibbling a leaf. She proceeded to act like a tame goat, just staying close by with a wiggly drooping tail (that means content). It’s never happened since — a real Jane Goodall moment!
Sharon in Sweden 2008
The wildness of Earth is our home. We are the newer form — the younger sibling — in the grand scheme, and we still need to learn how we fit in. When wandering in the natural world, all of your senses are engaged at once, allowing pure learning to really sink in. Try it. The wildness of Earth is our home. All those communities of wetlands and bugs…the diversity of species was all humming along before humans evolved our advanced consciousness. We are the newer form — the younger sibling — in the grand scheme, and we still need to learn how we fit in. It has been 42 years since Sharon Powers spent her first summer living in a handmade 18th century style tipi, or wigwam. From Wyoming to Florida she has traveled the country, maintaining Native camp for seasons at a time. For 15 years she was active in historic re-enactments using her wigwam encampment, where large gatherings lasted up to 10 days. She also participated in many school programs and smaller gatherings as an outdoor educator/mentor, including the Spirit of Change Harvest Gatherings at the turn of this century. Her lodge currently sits just off the lawn in a future sugar maple grove where she can leave her comfy apartment at night to sleep outdoors. Sharon can be reached at sharonpowersanderson@gmail.com.
The herbal Journey ConTinues: th
15 International Herb Symposium BY SUSAN LEOPOLD The International Herb Symposium is an iconic herbal gathering “I brought Juliette to, I believe, the second IHS. It’s quite that has taken place in New England for 30 years. Founded by the story. Juliette was living on the Greek isle of Kythera at herbalist Rosemary Gladstar, the Symposium is where the seed of the time, in a small stone cottage just a stone’s throw from United Plant Savers was sprouted in 1994 after Rosemary posed the the Aegean Sea. She hadn’t been to the US since 1958, and I question to the herbalists, seed collectors, growers, harvesters, forreally wanted to bring her so people could meet this amazing mulators, herbal educators and entrepreneurs gathered: Should we woman, and so she could see the profound influence she had start raising awareness and protecting wild populations of native on generations of herbalists. She really had no idea at the medicinal plants? The answer was a resounding yes. And so, United time of how her work had touched so many lives. Plant Savers was formed as a non-profit organization dedicated to I had flown over to visit her a couple of times and asked native medicinal plant conservation, with the International Herb her if she would come to the next IHS. She was quite happy Symposium held bi-annually as a to be invited, so I returned fundraiser. home and began advertising The Symposium holds a special in earnest. Everyone was so place among conferences, bringing excited she was coming — this people together from so many woman, whose books they had diverse backgrounds and ways been reading and who had so of working with the plants. While inspired their herbal journey! for many years the gathering has We had the biggest turnout ever enjoyed the spacious grounds of that year (over 900 people — you Wheaton College in Norton, MA for have to remember this was the outdoor medicine plant walks, classearly 1990s). Juliette had told es, fire circles and joyous outdoor me she would prefer to arrange celebrations, this year, due to COVID her own ticket, but as the weeks social distancing, the Symposium drew close for the IHS and there will be making the leap to holding an was still no news from Juliette I online conference for June 13-15, 2021. began to worry. There was no InThis year’s virtual forum makes it so ternet or emailing back then, and much easier for everyone to attend if there were, Juliette wouldn’t either all or part of the weekend have had it anyway. She didn’t including virtual international mediceven have a phone. I had to call inal walks, keynotes focused on the a person in the nearest town to connection between human health drive out to get Juliette and bring and the health of the planet, an herbher to the nearest phone to call al veterinarian track, and inspiring me. When I finally reached her, and innovative ways to connect and she calmly informed me she had collectively support the networking decided not to come, but that I The late English herbalist Juliette de Baïracli Levy of a global herbal village. wasn't to worry because she had Learning from elders is at the heart of the herbal tradition and made tapes that I could play! the heart of the Symposium as well. I recently watched “Juliette “Juliette,” I said, “pack your bags. I’m coming to get you!” of the Herbs” (1998), a documentary about Juliette de Bairacli And that’s exactly what I did. I caught a plane that night, Levy, an herbalist specializing in holistic veterinary medicine, and flew to Greece and the adventure began! As it turned out her one of the original IHS elders. In the opening of the documenpassport and papers weren't in order; we found this out as tary, Juliette talks about the two plants she would always have we were ready to board the plane to the US. I had to spend growing outside her home in each one of her gardens. Rosemary, a few days in Athens getting an expedited passport for her her favorite herb — she talks about how she cures practically and we finally made it back to the US just two days before the everything by bathing with rosemary. The name itself comes from conference began! But it was all worth it. People got to meet the Latin ros, meaning “dew,” and marinus, meaning “sea,” which an extraordinary woman. And even more importantly, Juliette translates to “dew of the sea.” The second herb is southernwood, was able to see how deeply and profoundly her work had an artemisia, named after the great herbalist and the protector of touched others.” women and the newborn infant. Since I knew Juliette was her mentor and inspiration, I emailed Susan Leopold is the Executive Director of United Plant Savers. Join Rosemary Gladstar to share the story about Juliette’s journey to the their email list to stay informed about plant conservation news and IHS. This is what she shared: the International Herb Symposium. www.unitedplantsavers.org
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Heather Peters
Stepping Into Nature
Beautiful Distractions By Heather Peters
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his year has been difficult for teachers and school systems. We have all been tossed into something new and uncomfortable in many ways. I have the privilege of working in a small, independent school that honors the needs of children, and have had the opportunity to rethink my teaching in interesting ways. Leading a group of first graders is always a wonderful challenge, and this year it takes on new meaning as I work to balance the reality of a global pandemic with the needs for joy and creativity to be a part of daily classroom living. The school where I work and the community I am a part of has always embraced the outdoors as a place to seek peace, wonder, and inspiration. This year gave us more of a push to head outdoors; this year, the six-and seven-year-old students and I are outdoors all day. 42 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
Being outdoors has been a gift for our group. We all know children need to be outdoors as much as possible. Increased physical activity, connection with science and mathematics through hands-on exploration, and personal development through discovery of strengths are a few major benefits. I have always intuitively known this throughout my 13 years of teaching, and this year I have the pleasure of living it. Each day I gear up for the weather and head into the woods with my sweet group. We play and learn together and are growing in our understanding of the natural world and our place in it. We have shared so many moments together this year that have been the kind of experiences we will never forget. Many of them were spontaneous and brought to us through natural observation. These moments have been beautiful distractions. There was a time in the fall when we noticed a monarch caterpillar emerging from its chrysalis. Right there, in front of our eyes, we watched a butterfly emerge through its final transformation. It was breathtaking and wondrous and all of those superlative words we use to describe such an experience. One of the students remarked, “This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.” I agreed. It was one of those moments we will collectively remember forever. When we are outside talking about letters and numbers, wondering about how sounds connect to create worlds, we always stop what we are doing when we hear the call of the red-tailed hawk. There are a few that frequent our space and we love to watch them soar and wonder what they have been up to. Where are they going? Are they hunting? Where did they come from? We are also surrounded by other native New England birds — blue jays, chickadees, titmice, cardinals, goldfinches — and stop to observe them. These beautiful distractions are a welcome opportunity to think about something different, learn about the beauty of the natural world, and learn about what distractions are and how they can expand creativity. The ability to move in and out of distractions is also translating into flexibility within student work. We are coming to see other pieces of our day as beautiful, where we once might have been apprehensive: beautiful mistakes, beautiful accidents, beautiful disagreements. We are learning that the things in our life that were not a part of our original design or plan can become a beautiful part of our lives and we can learn to move in and out of them with confidence. These beautiful distractions are teaching us about how all experiences can be met with purpose, and we can learn from all of them. This summer I was standing in a storage shed we use for classroom supplies feeling overwhelmed by the work that was necessary to prepare for this upcoming outdoor school year. I heard the familiar call of a red-tailed hawk and turned around, leaning on the doorway to watch the hawk soaring above me. In that moment, I found myself thinking about how beautiful that distraction was, and how honored I felt to be a part of something so important and connected to the natural world. I was wishing for this same experience for all teachers and students and families everywhere. This year has shown me the many benefits that being outdoors can provide, and I will continue to keep my classroom outside as long as possible. Every child deserves to develop their sense of self and purpose by navigating all the wonders the natural world has to offer. This experience has allowed me the daily reminder that being outside has growth benefits for students and teachers alike and that there is always time to stop and admire the natural world and the beauty that connects us. Heather Peters is a Head Teacher at Touchstone Community School in Grafton, MA. She currently teaches the 6/7-year-old group. Heather is passionate about progressive education and is always growing in her understanding of what it means to be a teacher. She is a parent of two young people, Ruth and Fern, and her goal is to be the kind of teacher that they would be proud of. You can reach her at heatherp@touchstoneschool.com.
Ideas for Getting Your Kids Into Nature By Danielle Cohen
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earing your children away from their screens and into the backyard, let alone the woods, can be difficult, but the slew of benefits that the outdoors provides kids’ minds is ample reason to give it a try. Happily there are lots of ways to make nature as stimulating as the activities kids like to do inside. Here are some ideas:
SET UP TREASURE HUNTS. Make a short, simple list of things for your kids to look for outside — such as “a shiny object,” or “something you can hold liquid in.” The satisfaction of finding the objects turns it into a reinforcing activity, and it will keep them outside in search of the next list item. IDENTIFY THINGS. Get a book with pictures about birds, bugs, leaves, trees, or flowers in your local area, and go outside looking for specific creatures in the book to identify. Matching leaves to pictures and names has a reinforcing treasure hunt kind of appeal. The same goes for bird calls. GIVE THEM THE TOOLS TO DISCOVER. Gifts like a bug box, a magnifying glass, or a shovel will promote ways to explore the outdoors with a fun new tool that feels professional and empowering. GO TO AN OUTDOOR PERFORMANCE. Parks in almost every city have performances for kids, many of which are free. If your child can’t take her eyes off Nickelodeon, take her to a puppet show in the park. For older kids who like movies, take them to outdoor plays and musicals. START A COLLECTION. You can find small parts of nature like rocks or shells almost everywhere, and starting a collection adds appeal, giving a kid motivation to search and therefore spend time outdoors. Just make sure you’re not in a state park; most have rules that don’t let you bring anything home. USE TECHNOLOGY TO YOUR ADVANTAGE. If your kid is hooked on any and all electronic devices, have him bring along a camera or phone and create video or photo journals of various nature trips. He’ll still be near a piece of technology, but he’ll be using it to focus on the world around him. GO FRUIT OR VEGETABLE PICKING. Coming home with a basket of food that they’ve gathered on their own is both rewarding and might make them appreciate their food more, and where it comes from. PLANT A GARDEN. Tracking the progress and seeing the eventual product of a seed your child planted provides a different, deeper sense of achievement than beating a difficult level in a video game or getting a lot of likes on your last Instagram. Continued on page 44 www.spiritofchange.org
SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 43
KIDS INTO NATURE continued from page 43 TAKE A HIKE. Walking on a trail to a waterfall or breathtaking view also gives kids a sense of accomplishment, rewarding them for their physical efforts during the hike. This goes for bike rides, too. If there’s a swimming hole at the end, they’ll even be able to cool off. Just don’t forget to bring snacks and take short breaks to keep their energy up! MAKE ART PROJECTS. For the kids who would rather sit inside with some arts and crafts, get them to use objects from nature for their art. Picking flowers to press onto paper, using berry juice as paint, or collecting pinecones and rocks to decorate are ways to infuse nature into activities they already enjoy. BUILD SOMETHING. You can also reverse the process and make art with your kids that will support and nurture the natural world — things like bird feeders or flower boxes. Kids will keep coming back to watch an object they created provide for other living things.
Organizations To Help Get Your Kids Outside
The urgency of kids’ lack of outdoor play isn’t lost on nature and wildlife organizations, many of which have started programs to get more kids outside. As part of their effort to get 10 million kids outdoors, the National Wildlife Federation provides lots of ways to find connections to nature near you. Other programs to get kids playing in nature include the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, the US Forest Service’s More Kids in the Woods program, the Sierra Club’s Inspiring Connections Outdoors program, and many more. All the advantages that nature offers ring true for adults, too, especially for stress relief and mood improvement. Try to get outside with your kids; not only will it show them how important spending time in nature is, but you might find you enjoy it just as much as they do. Danielle Cohen is a freelance journalist in New York City. Reprinted with permission from ChildMind® Institute, an independent, national nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of children and families struggling with mental health and learning disorders. www.childmind.org 44 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
The Sky is Falling, the Sky is Falling! By Maureen St. Germain
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hat if extraterrestrials show up? What if an earthquake strikes? What if your candidate doesn’t get inaugurated? What will you do when all of heaven breaks loose and everyone around you is losing their minds or their focus or their belief systems? Let the universe help you with a breakthrough. You don’t need to practice heroics; it’s not expected of you. Only salmons need to swim upstream. The universe has abundant energy to assist you in taking actions that will support your shifting and changing, but if you are holding on, the universe cannot support you in getting you where you need to go. Consider that you might lose your job, your income, your lover, or your family connections. What would you do about an unexpected loss? All big corporations have a disaster plan; do you? A disaster plan considers the worst case scenarios, who would be in charge, how decisions would be made, and it provides for options. It also means you pay attention to your inner guidance, inner voice and inner nudging, since an important part of your disaster plan might be to let go of worrying or a decision to stop struggling. Learning to ground yourself can assist this process. You can do this by connecting to Earth. In the middle of panic mode, take a moment and breathe. Put your attention on your tailbone. Extend an imaginary rod from your tailbone to the center of Earth. Anchor yourself like a tree. Plant your roots well. See every little worry or frenzy that disturbs you follow this shaft into the ground and dissipate, like a lightning rod grounds a lightning bolt. Release your fear and worries to Mother Earth, and let her clear your body and mind. Earth will send back to you calming support. This technique will become easier and more familiar with practice.
Next, identify at least two positives related to your situation that will allow you to see the silver lining of this issue. Claim these positive thoughts for yourself; they are the foundation of your new experience. Affirm your resolution and how satisfied you are, as you allow the universe to surprise you with its solutions. Final step, get out of the way. For, imagine you are in a cab leaving LaGuardia Airport in New York City, headed for Manhattan. Will you tell the taxi driver how to get you there? Of course not! The universe knows even more than a New York City taxi driver, and — believe it! — the universe is your new best friend. Right now, we are all faced with both limitations and choices. We are faced with the confining limits of how to pay our bills, how to move forward, how to create the best new lifestyle for ourselves since the old way most definitely has been left behind. How will you do this? Announce to yourself and to the universe, “I am learning my lessons through love.” When you find yourself in situations of discomfort or disquiet, remind yourself daily, “I am learning my lessons through love,” and be open to the corrections of those around you who love you and want to protect and advise you. Life can be fun and easy. We choose to make it so with our words, beliefs and our intentions. We also make it so with our sincere approach to helping others with the corrections we need to give them through love — without vindictiveness — and by doing it in a loving way. Known as The Practical Mystic, Maureen St. Germain’s passion is supporting individuals in their personal expansion and spiritual awakening. A sought-after speaker, transformation teacher and author, she has taught in 24 countries since 1995, and her books have been translated into seven languages. Visit www.maureenstgermain.com.
Awakening to the Gift of a Flower Garden By Carolyn McGee
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y grandmother had over an acre hillside garden filled with every flower imaginable. It was as if Mother Nature had stepped into my grandmother and come to life. As a child, that hillside was the most magical place on Earth for me. There was a river that ran through the property at the bottom of the hill and I would sit as close to the garden as possible, listening to the magical tingling sounds of the water and feeling happy. I didn’t know then the impact of the water and nature on my soul. Some of my most powerful childhood memories include when my grandmother would take me on a tour and explain the beauty. I wish that I would’ve paid more attention to her stories about all those flowers. As I became a young woman and set off on my own, I unconsciously re-created the safety and security of my grandmother’s garden. I always had a fish tank in my home where I would allow the water to flow much like the river I loved as a child. I surrounded myself with flowers and plants and was often my happiest transplanting things with dirt under my fingernails. Along the way, I got lost. During my marriage, gardening became a rule-following
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GIFTS OF A FLOWER GARDEN continued from page 45 exercise. It no longer brought me joy to see the flowers all in little rows perfectly measured apart. They mirrored back to me how I was rigidly being held in an energetic space that did not allow me to flourish as my authentic self. The first thing I did when I separated from my husband and occupied my own home was to create a free-flowing flower garden. I got slips of plants from both of my grandmothers’ gardens and my mother’s garden and created beautiful flow and synergy throughout my yard. I spent many hours, again with my fingers in the dirt, intuitively moving a plant from one spot to the other that I felt would give it the support it needed at that moment. Over the years I sometimes found myself moving the same plant from one side of the yard to the other — allowing it, loving it, and supporting it in whatever way it and I needed in that moment. As my garden flourished and expanded, I healed and returned to my intuitive, free-spirited center. I added water fountains to my yard and home, and thrived. I grew up in North Carolina until I was seven-years-old and always felt I was more a Southern gal. Eventually when I knew it was time for me to start my transition to move out of the Northeast, I moved with my plants to a beautiful townhouse apartment after I sold my home, as the first stop along my journey back to my roots. Having my heirloom plants connected me to Earth and my grandmothers. The beauty anchored my energy, and I spent many hours with my hands in the dirt on my patio connecting to Earth energy while listening to the soothing flowing water of my fountains. When it came time for me to move South the timing did not appear that it would work for me to bring my plants with me so a friend volunteered to keep them at her home over
the winter and I would get them in the spring. When the day came for her to help me plant them in pots so they could winter with her I was devastated. It became crystal clear to me how connected I am to the energy of these beautiful plants. Not only do they keep me connected to Mother Earth and provide joy with their blossoming beauty, they nourish me in a way that I did not understand until that moment. I could not imagine moving without them. So, I put my trust in my angels and guides that everything would be taken care of, that divine timing would support me and my flowers, and it did. Within a couple of weeks, I found the perfect little home in North Carolina and had a closing date. All unfolded beautifully, and my friend and I dug up my plants for the journey south. It is the cycle of life and support with a deeper level of understanding and connection that sustained me during the move and settling in. Knowing that just standing for a few minutes by my plants would reset my energy, ground me, and connect me deeper to source energy made the challenge of an out-of-state move flow easier. My plants are safely in my new backyard patiently waiting for spring to set in new roots. They continue to bring me joy even in the dormant period of winter. We await with anticipation the new opportunities for growth and expansion in our new environment. I feel their love and support and am grateful for my connection to nature. Carolyn McGee specializes in amplifying your intuitive superpower to understand, trust and follow your soul’s path to live a joyful, abundant, and purposeful life. Helping you remember your intuitive connection enhances your ability to receive messages, and understand and trust your guidance 24/7 to take empowered action. www.CarolynMcGee.com
Nature and Me By Sarah Fuhro
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s always, I turn into the woods, step into the meadow, where, as always, I hear the hum, of activity, of song.
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ave you ever had a dream where you discover a whole new floor or hidden room in your house? Each journey into the woods feels this way to me. I step out of my house or my car into a place, which may be familiar, but is never the same. The rules of movement are constant flux: the other residents can never be predicted. The light, the seasonal changes, which unfold day after day, make me gasp with wonder, or sigh with nostalgia for the mushroom or flower, which was there yesterday, but flowed and transformed into another life form.
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heaters are not open during the pandemic, but when I step into a place of woods or meadows, I enter an ever-changing drama, which never ceases to quicken my heart. A hawk swoops over my head, and watches my dog and me as we enter her domain. We are both cast and audience in this theater. Once more I am at home, yet it is a home never the same, and each turn in the path takes me down another corridor to a room transformed.
They are there, as always, my guides, my compass. Walk deeper, a branch slaps my face. As always, I am stunned. Is it possible, I trespass?
Fired by mystery, mythology and the lure of the natural world Sarah Fuhro, practitioner of Druidry, wanders the woods, swamps and meadows of the Sudbury Valley. You can read her Moon blog at https://sarahfuhro.wordpress.com. 46 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
Robert Fuhro
Sarah Fuhro
Movement catches my eye, flight, turns my head.
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Text and photos by JULIE ROST
COME AND SIT WITH US
A Lady Slipper Love Story
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he lady slipper first activated my heart, as most of nature does, when I was least exI knew they were going to teach me a new way of communing, hearing, knowing, remempecting it. This was just one of many lessons I would learn, starting with how to listen bering. Their sheer beauty drew me in to sit quietly. That was always their call: “Just come sit for the quality of her silent wisdom. Like every other creation, the lady slipper is a with us.” At first, I studied them like a scientist. I did some research on my phone right there unique expression of divine intelligence, which, by overcoming the challenges of its own ex- in the woods, learning from naturalists, botanists, mythologists, and flower essence farmers. istence over millennia, results in a highly specific essence. What began for me as a childlike The lady slipper’s flower essence is an energetic vibration that helps us discover our path of observation and study turned into a spiritual friendship, a feeling of companionship, essence, our unique attributes and contributions to the world, our sacred piece in the puzzle comfort and inspiration. Finally, I realized what was drawing me towards of life. Yoga calls this dharma and, like the lady slipper, understands that the lady slipper was my own true self. Her essence filled the holes in my The lady slipper our highest purpose is merely and powerfully to discover our highest self. I heart, reuniting the fragments of my soul so that I could more beautifully felt the lady slipper lighting me up, showing me that the path, as well as the shine as an expression of the divine. This is, in truth, the very essence of the first activated my destination of dharma, feels exciting, wondrous, beautiful, hopeful, magical; lady slipper, so let me now tell you our story. that it doesn’t need to be hard, and the effort required will flow easily at the heart, as most I will never forget meeting this pair of lady slippers two spring seasons ago. right time. Can you remember a moment in your life in which time seemed to stand still, This was just what I needed to hear. I had been working very successfully of nature does, to hold some significance yet to be understood? I have a mental photograph training Yoga teachers and running a yoga studio for 15 years, but I was when I was least bogged down in the administration of business and managing people. I of the precise moment when, for no apparent reason, I turned my head to look up at a ridge where the lady slippers were growing. I marveled at their pink, longed for space and time to integrate all I had learned from my life, sensing expecting it. delicate beauty in an otherwise stark landscape. I felt like a child in a fairy tale, a new direction for my teaching that would better serve others, as well as discovering a rare treasure. I am smiling now as I look back on this moment of innocent curios- my soul. But all was uncertain. Others were not exactly happy with my decision, and I had no ity, now that I know the lady slippers so well. They knew what was to come! They knew I would idea where I was going. return a full year later, and that our relationship would heal and transform me. The lady slippers already knew. Their tune is like the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Yoga text, whose title means “Song of the Blessed One.” The unknown author of the Gita, like the lady MAY 11: Sure enough, my life brought me to a difficult turning point, and I dedicated slipper, shares wisdom to guide one gently and beautifully toward the true prize — reunion myself to walking for two hours every day in the woods in order to make space to listen. I had with the divine whole. And both do so with a quiet allure, and a repetition of themes to awakforgotten all about the lady slippers, but they didn’t mind. They caught me by surprise a secen our soul’s sleepy lull again and again with humor, patience and compassion. ond time, resprouting in the same spot I had first seen them. Once again, I had the intuitive feeling that something sacred was happening, and I named their location Lady Slipper Rock, MAY 14: To my delight, I learned that the pink lady slipper is not only an orchid, but also a place I would pass by each day, but only occasionally be called in to listen. the New Hampshire state wildflower! Though this variety is not currently endangered, they 48 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
have been given special concern status. They don’t transplant well, so although it is not illegal to dig up or cut them, they tend not to survive when taken out of the place in which they naturally seed with the assistance of adequate moisture and a symbiotic relationship with fungus. I contemplated this while reveling in their sacred beauty one day, and I began to hear their message in my own mind. It feels strange to tell you they were speaking to me, but that is what it felt like. I heard, “You and all of humanity are endangered in terms of your soul.” As I continued to listen, they said, “You are very important, and the world will encroach upon your sacredness. Find a protected place, and you will grow for a long time.” Once lady slippers find a protected space, which can sometimes take 16 years, they can live for 50! This information was a bit serendipitous for me, as my 50th birthday was approaching. This would be the first small seed of their greatest message over time: “You are we, and we are you.” MAY 17: One day, walking head down and deep in my own thoughts, I was yet again called over to the lady slippers. I was trying to figure something out, only it was my old way of doing things — striving, planning, intellectual, goal oriented. I felt the lady slipper’s compassionate laughter at my folly. “Why all the running around?” they asked. “It is time to get to know who you are, and the essence of life. The only way to do that is to slow down. Come sit with us. Breathe and look around. Listen for your higher self and the greater beauty and wisdom of life.” When I do this in nature, I always receive what I need, often in the form of answers to questions or new revelations, or simply the awareness of how much I was struggling, irritated, sad or angry about something in my life. It is no coincidence to me now that I would be called into a relationship with a plant with such obviously feminine qualities. At first, the lady slipper’s name, beauty and grace were lost on me, reflective of how out of balance I was with my own feminine nature. Even the history of her name would only later make sense to me. According to folklore, a Native American woman ran barefoot through the woods in search of medicine to save her tribe, and she was found collapsed in the snow. The flowers, which look like slippers or moccasins, grew to mark her bravery. For me, this story reveals the often undervalued strength inherent in the selfless, loving and life-giving quality of the feminine, while giving warning as well, to the perils of sacrificing too much. The lady slipper’s message for me, and our larger world, is one in which the masculine and feminine are in balance together, and in service to life and beauty.
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MAY 19: The more I surrendered to the awakening feminine energy within me, the more joy and ease I felt. I pondered concepts like hope, which means “to believe things will get better.” I truly felt this hope. I thought about peace, which I realized was an ability to be with what is rather than resist or fight. I felt all these virtues with ease in nature. I was at my best there, without doubt, shame or fear. All was clear, and I was on my right path, frequently hearing the message that I was surrounded and “guided always and in all ways.” I began to experience what I later called “heart infusions.” I felt an enormous and loving compassion rise up in nature, especially from the trees, and learned to notice the different emotions evoked by the pine versus the oak, birch, beech, and cedar. They, too, had specific essences to gift me and humanity. I soon was able to access these loving infusions in my home meditation practice as well. I needed only to remember its infinite source, and call it in. By this time the lady slippers were in their full blossom, a deep shade of pink. They were bursting with their essence at the same time my heart was bursting and expanding with love and compassion for all beings. JUNE 1: On this day I spotted four new lady slippers in another part of the forest, which had successfully escaped the well-worn mountain biking trails. It felt like a party. They were grateful to be alive! They expanded my understanding of the essence of the lady slipper, as I considered the power of their words “thank you” and “yes.” They reminded me to say “thank you” to life more often, and even to experiment with using those words as a mantra. How might these choices to say “thank you” and “yes” re-tune our channel and determine the signal we receive from life around us? JUNE 2: As the lady slippers were in their feminine glory, I was experiencing the presence of a masculine guide in my home meditation practice, whom I later named “Holy Brother.” To my surprise, he embodied an enormous compassion and concern for my then-troubled heart. His energy said simply but profoundly, “I am so sorry for your sadness and pain.” I cried like I had never cried before, as though I was releasing all the small wounds of a life in which I had tried to please others, to seek approval, and secure proof that I was valuable and worthy of being here. This guide taught me what the divine masculine is all about. As I visited the lady Continued on page 50 www.spiritofchange.org
SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 49
COME AND SIT WITH US: A LADY SLIPPER LOVE STORY continued from page 49
slipper on this day, I felt him beholding her, devoted to protecting and honoring her divine essence. Shiva (masculine) knows that his power is nothing without the manifestation of Shakti (feminine). Like all opposites, one is not better than the other, but essential parts of a harmonious whole. In Yoga’s cosmology, like so many spiritual traditions, Shiva, or God, first created an other out of, one might say, boredom and loneliness. What a powerful reflection on the most essential concepts — the desire to adore creation’s beauty, followed by the desire to enjoy that with another. As soon as the other was created, all the dualities were born, including masculine and feminine, as well as dark and light, happy and sad, etc. Along with these harmonizing opposites came free will — each creation has the freedom to diverge from or merge with God, for what satisfaction is there in requiring or forcing others to join with us? When it comes through freedom of choice, there is nothing more blissful.
slipper tells us, any thoughts that are not celebrating our beautifully perfect divine spark are not of our essence. For most of us, this looks like feeling bad about ourselves, questioning our worth, seeking approval from others and the outside world, fearing we are not good enough. How do we let go of all that we are not? We see it for what is. We look at it with courage. We feel it in our body and breath, and let the light of consciousness transform it into new strength, just as the layered leaves around the lady slipper create the fertile ground for next year’s growth.
NOVEMBER 23: As I passed by the lady slippers on this day, I said, “Hello, my friends,” but I did not hear their call. As I walked on by, I noticed a flicker of light shining on a leaf behind them, and it looked like a small hawk feather. I walked closer. The hawk is one of my spirit animals, teaching me how to live in the world and also in the heavens at the same time. They remind me that I am a spiritual being having a human experience. As I walked closer to the small hawk feather, I realized it was only a leaf, and I laughed. This, too, was a lesson from the lady slipper. Though the feather did not even exist, its energy JUNE 3: The color began to fade on the lady slippers. Around the same time, I saw that a came to my mind, and the lesson was received. In case I had forgotten this important point, lady slipper in a different part of the forest had been run over by a mountain bike. Although I lady slipper was reminding me that we are constantly being reflected back to ourselves, was deeply saddened by this, I also felt them teaching me the beauty of the life and death cycle. through our wounds and our wisdom, through that which draws us in with delight, and that In my recent experiences with my guide, I had contemplated the word compassion and loved which triggers our darkest self. Our Earthly existence is continuously turning us back toward the light, toward our center, back to who we really are, its definition “to suffer with.” I found this concept so movback to who we’re meant to be. ing, healing and important in our increasingly uncertain Seeing the hawk leaf in my mind was just the key to and divisive world. An even deeper truth emerged — the unlock the wisdom. As I reflected on it, opening my mind more we expand our consciousness beyond the limitations to receive, I was curious about its small size, as well as of the mind and open to the unseen, the more faith and how feathers have come to be important signs of angels, ease with which we can flow through life, accept the ending of flight, lightness, elevation. What occurred to me was in its right time, and look forward to the reality we can’t that maybe in these challenging times, we could feel comquite understand beyond that. After thoughts such as these, fortable being the little hawk feather. We don’t have the I said, “Thank you so much, lady slippers.” answers for other people or solutions to the world’s problems. But as we connect to our life purpose, our highest JULY 30: As I watched the flowers slowly crinkle, I self, and be that in the world, it’s like we’re scattering little was surprised to notice how strong their stalks were. My feathers that people find, that shine a light for them, help old brain had already tossed them aside as dead, but they them take flight. Maybe these little feathers that fall, and were far from dead. They were in transition, just as our enWith snow on the ground and very gently, mystically, carry people into the next thought, help ergy as humans shifts form in death. Upon closer examinathem arrive closer to their spiritual being. Maybe we can tion, their large leaves at the surface of the ground were as cold air, I noticed a very different feel really good about being those tiny little hawk feathers. vibrant and healthy as ever! I was somewhat disappointed in myself for not recognizing that they were so much more energy from the lady slippers. DECEMBER 21: With snow on the ground and than their beautiful blossom. As the petals shriveled, their very cold air, I noticed a very different energy from the lady slippers. Their message was energies were redirected to the next step, once again with ease and grace, as they participated one of stillness, pause, and being. It opened my heart with a profound reverence. I felt an in the cycle of nature. We, too, are this strong. We, too, can flow with ease and grace as we align overwhelming presence of the unseen world, including Jesus, the angels, and all my spiritual with the cycles of life’s natural rhythms. There is a time to burst forth and a time to let go. guides. The wind of consciousness picked up, and the trees, including the baby hemlock, waved their hands as though saying, “Pick me! Pick me!” They were offering to continue AUGUST 7: On some of my walks, I passed right by the lady slippers without a thought. being part of this awakening, and the beginning of something new for our world, as we heal On other days, I felt their energetic pull to come and sit. What was this all about? A friend from our wounds and rediscover our connection to all that is. called this phenomena “land energy spots.” Perhaps you have noticed that certain areas in nature are like magnets to your soul? Is there a reason you are called to these places, to better hear your soul? I had long been observing that I talked to myself on my walks in nature. Because I received such beautiful counsel, I began to feel as though the trees were holding this conversation with me, or at least providing compassionate ears and energetic embraces. In time I realized it didn’t matter who I was talking to. I was always talking to a version of my higher self, my God essence; the part of me that was completely awakened, was talking to me from a different timeline and dimension. Whether I heard this wisdom from the trees or from the lady slipper, both were aspects of my soul being reflected back to me. So were all the others — rock formations, birds, plants, insects, animals, weather patterns, human relationships and world events. It was a mind-bender, but also felt like a great secret to life. This is the power of interconnection, of the truth that all is one. The wisdom we need is right there in front of us, ready to guide us back to the harmony of the whole. OCTOBER 17: On this windy fall morning, the blossoms were dry and brown, the stalks remained strong, with a beautiful layering of fallen leaves all around their base. Again, I was amazed at the strength and beauty that remains when we are stripped of all we think we are. One of my favorite human teachers had told me, “As soon as we have let go of all that we are not, then we are truly capable of being our whole selves.” What are we not? As the lady 50 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
DECEMBER 28: Like all of nature’s wisdom, the lady slipper’s essence is ready to fill our hearts with what we most truly desire — reconnection with our soul and our sacred purpose in the world. This queen of the forest knows that first we must find compassion for ourselves. She sits patiently, shining light on the beauty inherent even in our wounds and darkness, helping us let go of all that we are not. From this release and flow with the cycles of life, she reminds us that thoughts and action are most holy and profound when combined with joy, ease and grace. The lady slipper is a spiritual companion, helping us to awaken our knowing that friendship is not only our fundamental yearning, but the only path to rediscovering our soul’s interbeing with the greater web of creation, including the ever-abiding and loving source within us. Thank you so much, lady slippers. Julie Rost, e-RYT 500, C-IAYT, as founder of the YogaLife Institute of NH, has been providing yoga classes, workshops, retreats, Yoga Teacher Training and Comprehensive Yoga Therapy training since 2006. In 2020, Julie simplified her business focus to the teaching of Yoga’s philosophy, practices and lifestyle via personal mentoring, virtual online Yoga Philosophy courses, her blog about the connection between nature and Yoga living, as well as her YouTube channel to share all of the above: https://youtu.be/wa8BqcnA3yw
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SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 51
I Spy With My
EAGLE EYE PHOTOS AND TEXT BY
Trish Whynot
F
or the last few years, I've been following an eagle family in my spare time. It's about a 30-minute paddle from where I launch my kayak to their nest. With all the heaviness in the world right now I thought it would be fun to reflect on the reemergence of eagles in my area through my photos. I've even recorded them calling to each other. My earliest eagle photo was from 2008 with a point-and-shoot camera. I remember spotting two large birds flying toward the far end of the lake while on a boat ride with my family. I asked if we could follow them. They rolled their eyes at me but I insisted. It ended up being two adult bald eagles and then a third joined them. They dove for fish and put on quite a show for us. This proved to be a rather glorious sighting.
The camera I have now doubles as binoculars. Sometimes I might take up to 100 photos and not quite know what I've got until I get back home and load them onto my laptop. That's how high up in a pine tree the nest is. Plus, I take most of my shots from my kayak. Even if the photo looks sharp on my camera I never know for certain until I get home. There is a thrill that comes with being able to zoom in for a closer look, regardless, like when the eaglets are first born and it's hard to tell with the naked eye if mama is sitting on her eggs or if there is a chick with her or maybe two chicks. Comparing shots of the nest will show any subtleties of movement to give me clues. There are a lot of "Where's Waldo" moments in the area of the nest. Sometimes we find the parents perched at varying stations, silently guarding the nest from afar. When the eaglets get bigger and take flight we listen for their calls while scanning the neighboring trees. We can be looking for 10 to 15 minutes when we hear them and then find them right under our noses. When on the water, it can be challenging to tell exactly where the calls are coming from. Sometimes I get lucky when they take flight or fly in while I'm watching. And sometimes I end up with a butt shot, but on further examination realize that an eaglet's been born. That first glimmer of life in the nest is always so exciting! This is fun stuff for me. It brings forth a feeling I can't quite put words to beyond awe, wonder, and enchantment. Some days the eaglets are napping and the parents are out hunting when I arrive, so all I get is some exercise. You just never know. Once when with friends, we saw a group of small raptors raid the empty nest. It happened so quickly and caught me by surprise so I didn't get a photo. I’ve witnessed smaller birds such as crows or blue jays taunting the eagles, giving their location away. I was fortunate to capture some cool shots on one of those days. TRIVIA: Based on my research, bald eagle chicks are called eaglets. Eaglets are nestlings for 10 to 12 weeks. By the time they are nine-weeks-old they are full-grown. At about three to four weeks their feathers begin to change, and around 12 weeks is when they begin flying. Mom is in the nest with them about 90% of the time for the first five to six weeks, and Dad does the majority of the hunting. After five to six weeks the parents spend more and more time away from the nest, perching in nearby trees at first. Mom is approximately one third larger than Dad, while they both have the same col52 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
Nest atop the pine
oring: dark brown with white heads and tails, and yellow beaks. The female's wingspan can be up to eight feet. It takes a bald eagle between four and five years to get their adult colors including their yellow beaks. Even their eye color changes. They can't breed until they get their colors. Bald eagle expert, Bryan Watts, says eagles have a divorce rate of less than five percent. Not too shabby! From my experience, although the eaglets are born sometime in April, and by nine weeks are as large as their parents, the adults are still feeding them in late August. It's always a treat to arrive in the middle of a feeding or training session. The eaglets are pretty awkward on land compared to their parents. They use their wings as training wheels. As much as I enjoy my visits to the nest area where I'm pretty confident I'll catch a glimpse of an eagle, one of my favorite experiences is when I'm not looking for one and just happen to look up to find one looking down at me. Viewing my photos on my laptop to find that a dragonfly has photobombed my capture increases my degree of delight exponentially. I have learned some profound lessons from my eagle friends over the years: LESSON 1: Years ago, I spotted an eagle high in the early morning sky. I asked if it had a message for me. What I received was, “Don’t be afraid to love. That’s how you come to know God.” Wow! That was years and years ago but I remember it to this day. LESSON 2: I learned something about trusting my intuition from an eagle. One morning I had decided to get up early and kayak out to the middle of the lake to photograph the sunrise. Or so I thought. I was uncovering my kayak when my intuition said, “Go over to the dock and take a picture.” “But it’s dark, and it’s not even pretty,” I argued. I did walk over to the dock, but I didn’t take my camera out of the case. Next thing I know I hear this rustling noise above my head followed by kind of a woosh, woosh, woosh sound. A bald eagle had been perched directly above my head. As it swooped down right in front of me I wrestled to get my camera out of its case. I missed the shot but at least it landed on the island nearby. I paddled as fast as I could, and it let me take a bunch of photos. Now when I catch myself arguing with my intuition, I burst out laughing — as if I know better. LESSON 3: I learned this third lesson from my reminiscing. My connection with eagles began as a calling. Nothing bad would have happened if I had ignored it, nor would I have known what I missed. From heeding this call, I know in my bones, the deep soul-level joy that comes from being in tune with that still small voice. Photography is a hobby for me. Photographing eagles definitely stretches my camera’s capabilities, and as you can see, it has stretched my intuitive capabilities over the years as well.
Majestic juvenile, but no colors yet
The nest
Dragonfly photobomb
Bluejay taunts
Trish Whynot, D.C.Ed. has been practicing holistic counseling for 21 years and has recently completed a Holistic Life Coach Certification. She is the author of "Why Me? Why Now? Why Not? Finding Opportunity in Your Obstacles," an illustrated guide to living that expects opportunities even during challenging times. Trish utilizes meditation and assistance from the mineral kingdom in her work with clients remotely and in person. Visit her at www.TrishWhynot.com. www.spiritofchange.org
SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 53
Calendar MARCH 3/1 — COLOR RAY HEALING TRAINING. Get three prerecorded classes with live coaching March-May. Learn to balance the spectrum of life issues and specific areas of the body. Plus, how to test a person’s main color ray. Visit LearnGem.org 3/1-3/29 — LIVE ONLINE LOVING ME FIRST: 5-week deliberate dating prep course.. Mondays, 6pm-8pm for 5 weeks. Ready to uncover what's been holding you back in finding your perfect-fit-partner? Look no further, the healing begins here! $199. www.awakenhcs.com 3/6 — REIKI I CERTIFICATION. Virtual via Zoom. Libby Barnett, MSW. 41 years experience. “Reiki Energy Medicine” author. Notebook, pin, certificate awarded. Credit cards accepted. CEU's/contact hours. Call (603) 654-2787. www.reikienergy.com. Reiki II: 3/7. 3/11-6/24 — REBIRTHING BREATHWORK FROM THE 13TH OCTAVE. Thursdays 6:30-9:30pm. Bi-monthly. This series of workshops will include a 13th Octave Initiation (a process of conscious union with Source/ Divine/God) and theory with practice of Rebirthing Breathwork. (203) 767-5954. www.academyforsoulhealing.com/rebirthing 3/27 — HOW TO GIVE DISTANT HEALING SESSIONS. Take your practice online. All modalities welcome. Learn the principles, ethics, skills, and techniques needed to give distant sessions safely, effectively, and without taking on unwanted energy. Visit LearnGem.org
APRIL 4/10 — REIKI MASTER CERTIFICATION. Virtual via Zoom, Libby Barnett, MSW. 41 years of experience. “Reiki Energy Medicine” author. Certificate awarded. Credit cards accepted. Call (603) 654-2787. www.reikienergy.com. 4/23-4/25 — 13TH OCTAVE LAHOCHI TRAINING. LaHoChi is an ancient healing modality that works as a
54 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
conduit to bring wholeness, balance and well-being to individuals. The 13th Octave is a process of conscious union with Source/Divine/God. It truly is the next step in energy healing. (203) 767-5954. www.academyforsoulhealing. com/13th-octave-lahochi-training 4/30-5/3 — LEVEL I HAND ANALYSIS TRAINING. Burlington, VT. Study with Janet Savage, Master Hand Analyst. Immerse yourself in modern palmistry and the science of fingerprints. Learn to be a Hand Analyst; incorporate this tool into your healing practice or study for personal growth. Visit https://www.handtales.com/ study/ for details. Contact Janet, (802) 279-8554. And ask me about the brand new on-line option starting in March 2021.
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JUNE 6/5-6/6 — HOLY FIRE III, REIKI I & II CLASS. Our Reiki I & II class is a thorough and comprehensive combination of Western style and Holy Fire Energies. After completing this class, you will be able to give Reiki treatments to yourself and others. Bena Phillipo, Holy Fire III, Reiki Master/Teacher. Sacred Resonance Healing. (508) 303-0366. www.SacredResonanceHealing.com. 6/5-6/9 — ANIMAS VALLEY INSTITUTE’S SOULCRAFT at Spirit Hollow in Shaftsbury, VT. A popular five-day experiential plunge into the wild depths using a synergistic set of nature-based practices designed to evoke the life-shifting experience of soul encounter with guide Doug Van Houten. Visit spirithollow.org.
5/15 — REIKI I CERTIFICATION. Virtual via Zoom. Libby Barnett, MSW. 41 years experience. Reiki Energy Medicine author. Notebook, pin, certificate awarded. Credit cards accepted. CEU's/contact hours. Call (603) 654-2787. www.reikienergy.com. Reiki II: 5/16.
6/10-6/13 — VIRTUAL 15TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL HERB SYMPOSIUM. A benefit event for United Plant Savers. Over 100 classes and teachers from 20 different countries, international virtual plant walks, international network of knowledge, veterinary botanical medicine track, cultivation and conservation track. Registration opens March 1, 2021. www.internationalherbsymposium.com.
5/15-5/16, 2021 — NEUROINFLAMMATION AND AUTOIMMUNE IMMUNITY with Caroline Gagnon. Identifying and calming the places where inflammation has settled chronically in the body can enormously improve health and wellbeing through the use of herbal remedies. Boston School of Herbal Studies. (617) 417-8686. www.bostonherbalstudies.com.
6/23-11/3 — AKASHIC FIELD HEALING. 20 weekly classes on Wednesdays 6:30-9:30pm. Learn this method of quantum healing, and access the Akashic Records, in order to release traumatic energies which can then free you to begin a new set of experiences instead of revisiting old ones. 203-767-5954 www.academyforsoulhealing.com/akashic-field-healing-one-on-one
JULY 7/17 — REIKI I CERTIFICATION. Virtual via Zoom. Libby Barnett, MSW. 41 years experience. “Reiki Energy Medicine” author. Notebook, pin, certificate awarded. Credit cards accepted. CEU's/contact hours. Call (603) 654-2787. www.reikienergy.com. Reiki II: 7/18. 7/30-8/7 — WILD WOMEN VISION QUEST at Spirit Hollow in Shaftsbury, VT. This immersion is held in a deeply resonant, revered, loved and protected hollow in a huge forested wilderness area in the southwestern Vermont Taconic Mountains, where vision quests, shamanic trainings, warrior and goddess camps have been held for decades. Open to women of all ages 18 and up who feel called. Application and letter of intent required. Visit spirithollow.org.
UPCOMING 9/1 — DIAMOND THERAPY ASSOCIATE PRACTITIONER CERTIFICATION BEGINS. Learn to support whole-being transformation in yourself and others using the healing power of Diamonds to awaken inner blueprint instructions for optimal health. 10-month course for self-therapy or certification. Visit LearnGem.org 9/1 — GEMSTONE THERAPY ASSOCIATE PRACTITIONER CERTIFICATION BEGINS. Learn to effectively and logically use gemstones to clear, nourish, balance, and align yourself and others in meaningful sessions. Take Level 1 courses anytime or in a class starting 9/1/2021. Visit LearnGem.org
more info or vendor applications contact Salli Greene at Alternatives for Health. (508) 347-2111 or sargreene@ gmail.com. www.sturbridgeherbfest.com. 11/13-11/14, 2021 — 14TH ANNUAL SPIRIT OF CHANGE MAGAZINE NATURAL LIVING EXPO. Royal Plaza Trade Center. 181 Boston Post Road West, Marlboro, MA. Saturday 9-6; Sunday 10-5. Featuring exhibits, workshops, readings, shopping and fun. Enjoy the healthy food courts for delicious breakfast, lunch and dinner meals throughout the weekend. Too much to see and do in one weekend! Plan to attend both days! www.NaturalExpo.org. 2/24-2/26, 2022 — 15TH EVIDENCE-BASED COMPLEMENTARY AND ALTERNATIVE CANCER THERAPIES CONFERENCE. West Palm Beach, FL. Natural cancer strategies, lifestyle issues and holistic/alternative treatments. www.annieappleseedproject.org.
ONGOING DIAMOND AND GEMSTONE THERAPY TRAINING. Explore both medicinal-grade therapy tools and an alternative-healing school offering meaningful and scientifically-based beginner to advanced training in Diamond and Gemstone Therapy at the Gemstone Therapy Institute. Get started any time with our free online classes. Visit LearnGem.org MINDFULNESS, LOVINGKINDNESS, RECOVERY AND DROP-IN MEDITATIONS held daily at Cambridge Health Alliance Center for Mindfulness and Compassion. Free of charge. See schedule and register at www.chacmc.org or (617) 591-6132. Also offered: 8-week MBSR, MSC and other
mindfulness and compassion courses, professional trainings and research opportunities. THE ECLECTIC INSTITUTE OF AROMATHERAPY AND HERBAL STUDIES offers the Introduction to European Based Aromatherapy Certification beginning March 13, 2021 in Sturbridge, MA; Level II Advanced Blending of Essential Oils beginning March 21, 2021 in Carlisle, MA. For details visit www.aromatherapyandherbalstudies.com MEDITATIONS FOR YOUR ONE WILD & PRECIOUS LIFE Every Wednesday in March, April & May from 12:00 – 12:30pm. Learn to help cultivate a spiritual practice during challenging times and wonderful times with Lisa Campbell at The Gentle Place. $9. For info go to www.mindfulfilled.com GENTLE KRIPALU YOGA ZOOM CLASSES. With Pat Lebau, professional level Kripalu Yoga teacher. M, W, TH at 10:30am. Gentle Zoom Yoga for Plantar Fasciitis on TH at noon. Donation-based payment via Paypal or Venmo. PatriciaLebau@gmail.com or 508-393-5581. www.PatLebauYoga.com. ECK LIGHT AND SOUND SERVICES ON ZOOM sponsored by the Massachusetts Satsang Society on the first and third Sunday of the month starting at 11am. Check eckinmass.org for monthly themes or contact Mark at resa_in_ma@yahoo.com. WELLNESS ROUNDTABLE HOLISTIC PRACTITIONERS NETWORKING GROUP. Please join us at our virtual monthly meetings, second Wednesday each month Sept-June. A welcoming community working for the greater health and wellbeing of all. Contact Ritu.Kapur@sohum.com.
9/4 — WOW SCHOOL OF ANGEL ALIGNMENT. Become an earth angel, bringing hope and planting seeds of joy! Do you long for greater connection, enhanced healing abilities, expanded messaging and intuitive skills and more joy? Receive powerful angel attunements, activations and IET I certification to increase your ability to hold and maintain your divine connection. One Sat/month. For 8 months. 11am-5pm. $1099. Women of Wisdom. (508) 230-3680. womenofwisdominc.com 9/18 — REIKI I CERTIFICATION. Virtual via Zoom. Libby Barnett, MSW. 41 years experience. “Reiki Energy Medicine” author. Notebook, pin, certificate awarded. Credit cards accepted. CEU's/contact hours. Call (603) 654-2787. www.reikienergy.com. Reiki II: 9/19. 9/25-10/9 — HEALING FROM THE BODY LEVEL UP™ MODULE 1: CLEARNING TRAUMA AND HEALING PTSD. Achieve stellar, faster, easier therapeutic results. Online training includes three Saturdays 9-6pm, plus prerecorded content. 35 CE credits available. Judith Swack, PhD. (781) 444-6940 or info@hblu.org. www.hblu.org. 10/2, 2021 — 2nd ANNUAL STURBRIDGE HERBFEST. Classes, vendors, food! Join us at the Sturbridge Senior Center, 480 Main Street, Sturbridge, MA. 9:30-4:30. For
www.spiritofchange.org
Explore both medicinal-grade therapy tools and an alternative healing school with Isabelle Morton, founder of Gemstone Therapy Institute. See Ongoing listing or visit LearnGem.org.
SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 55
NEW ENGLAND’S
HolisticDirectory SPRING/SUMMER 2021
Astrological Consulting
?
Questions? Astrologer Eric Linter has answers. Changes in relationships, career, health, finances or spiritual practice are inevitable. Eric’s clarity will help you stay on the right path. His insights help you better understand and appreciate life’s challenges. His clients say Eric Linter is “profound and enlightening” and “one of the best astrologers on the East Coast.”
Astrology
&
Esoteric Psychology Monique Pommier, M.A., Ph.DE
Astrology illuminates one’s psychological landscape and journey. It times life developments and reveals their designs for the soul. I offer astrological services and ongoing psychospiritual counseling with astrology, Jungian and esoteric psychology as a comprehensive ground of exploration and guidance
Eric, a professional astrologer for 25 years, works with individuals, couples and businesses. Specialties include career moves, personal creativity and karmic relationships. Consultations are available in person, by telephone, or on cassette. Eric also offers classes, lectures and appearances at parties and special events. For more information and to schedule a private session, contact Eric by email or call: stars@ericlinter.com X 508-541-4115 X
“I learned more from one session than I did from 5 years of analysis.” - J.G., Cambridge, MA
on current issues and lifelong questionings. By accessing the deeper order of your life, you gain transformative insights into the evolutionary meaning of particular challenges and new perspectives to direct your choices. My background includes an MS and PhD in Esoteric Psychology and Philosophy. Jungian psychology, Eastern and Western Traditions are key foundations in my approach. I have been in practice for 25 years. U Astrological Consultations U U Psychospiritual Counseling U www.astrologicalpsychology.com 617-524-7072
Classes, Certifications & Schools Eclectic Institute of Aromatherapy and Herbal Studies
Instructor Linda Patterson offers over 20 years of experience in the science, art and principles of herbalism and aromatherapy.
Classes, Certifications & Schools
At the Gemstone Therapy Institute, you’ll find both medicinal-grade therapy tools and an alternative-healing school offering meaningful and scientificallybased beginner to advanced training in Diamond and Gemstone Therapy.
Massage | Aesthetics Polarity | RYSE Ipswich • Plymouth • Westboro You deserve an education that honors who you are and who you are becoming. A great education is spiritually transforming: You overcome your limitations and realize your highest potential, at the same time you learn the foundation and skills to succeed. Excellent education is not by chance; it comes from years of listening to employers, graduates and students to find the best way to teach the most valuable information to make you successful. As a leader in energy medicine and energy
New England Institute of Reflexology & Universal Studies
Ongoing certification courses offered throughout the northeast including: ✴ 7-Month Herbal Certification ✴ 4-Month European-Based Aromatherapy Introduction ✴ 4-Month Advanced Aromatherapy Course ✴ 3-Month Conscious Nutrition Course ✴ Palmistry a tool of diagnoses
~ Now teaching throughout New England ~
www.aromatherapyandherbalstudies.com 978-297-4502
www.walkinbalance.com v 508-317-3044 v
56 Spirit of Change SPRING/SUMMER 2021
Join a circle of well-connected individuals who understand the art, science and transformative potential of gemstone healing in a world where an energy-based approach has become both accepted and essential for overall health and well-being. We can show you how to use diamonds and gemstones to get deep and meaningful healing results, so you can transform your life and fulfill your potential. Online classes available! Our founder, Isabelle Morton, was the original visionary for Diamond Therapy and Gemstone Therapy in 1987. She is the go-to expert on gemstones, how they work, and how to receive their benefits. LearnGem.org • 860-646-3063 education@gemformulas.com
based education since 1980, Nancy Risley recognizes that your education is a transformational healing process. As a successful therapist, author and teacher, her vision is to help you realize your dream of work that is creative and supports all aspects of who you are. Whether you work in a spa, clinic, or have your own business, you gain the required skills to create satisfaction as well as increased flexibility, control and income. The next step to fulfilling your future is to call for a no obligation, information interview with our Admissions Representative. We look forward to meeting you and learning about your future. Programs take from 4 to 12 months, depending on your schedule: Full-time, mother’s hours or part-time evenings. Accredited. Licensed. Financial Aid available for qualified students. 800-262-8530 v www.spatech.edu
v
v
v
Approved Continuing Education in Reflexology, Massage, and Reiki Integrative techniques strengthen foundations and create a balanced treatment style NCBTMB provider
Our goal is to act as a bridge between complimentary and conventional medicine through the training of qualified holistic practitioners. Join us!
Classes, Certifications & Schools
Children's Health & Services
AFFORDABLE HERBAL EDUCATION THROUGHOUT THE YEAR ❖ Intensive
7-Month Herbal Apprenticeships
❖ Advanced
Training – Levels Two and Three
❖ Aromatherapy ❖ Lyme
Certification – Two Levels
Disease Practitioner Training
Herbal Apprenticeships ❖ Advanced Training Aromatherapy Levels One and Two
UPCOMING HERBAL CLASSES
www.bostonherbalstudies.com Arlington, MA ❖ 617.417.8686
May 15-16, 2021 – Neuroinflammation and Autoimmune Immunity with Caroline Gagnon
Touchstone Community School is an independent school serving students in grades PK–8, cultivating a joy of lifelong learning through transformative intellectual, social, and emotional growth. Come visit us!
Learning through nature and outdoors The child as an active learner Project-based learning Challenging academics Focus on physical activity At least one hour of recess daily Focus on creativity and the arts No standardized testing Small class sizes Grafton, MA 508-839-0038 touchstoneschool.com
Coaching SPIRAL ARTS Spiral Arts is dedicated to providing rich experiences in the Expressive Arts as a deep path to personal discovery. Through unique workshops, personal coaching, and
The Art Ashram, Spiral Arts encourages spiritual exploration, healing with art, creative expression, intuitive art-making, and opportunities to find meaning on your personal path. No art experience or talent is necessary – you already have everything you need inside you! Dr. Patricia Wild www.spiralartsforlife.com 603-340-4566
My passion is providing guidance to tapping into to your Intuitive Superpower and receiving your divine messages with soul clarity and confidence.
Carolyn McGee Intuition Coach & Teacher Imagine a life where you follow your inner guidance to: k Make empowered and intuitive decisions
Centers
k Fulfill your soul’s destiny through
effective life strategies k Live in alignment with your highest purpose
Illuminating Light Healing Center Change Through Empowerment Rev. Kristen Stone is an Intuitive Psychic and Spiritual Medium. Rave reviews describe her as “connected and gifted” and having “an uncanny ability to zone right into your energy.”
Years! 24+
Women of Wisdom HOLISTIC HEALING CENTER
Usui, Holy Fire, Karuna Reiki Hypnotherapy G BARS G Massage Crystal Healing G Past Life Regression Integrated Energy Therapy Akisni G Inner Child Healing
www.spiritofchange.org
To begin your soul-guided journey, visit my website at: www.CarolynMcGee.com
Her readings are profound, accurate and get to the root of the soul’s need to heal. • Universal Readings: Psychic, Mediumship, Oracle & Tarot Cards • Healing Modalities: Usui, Karuna, Holy Fire, and Kundalini Reiki. New Paradigm M.D.T. • Mentoring/Coaching Programs: Intuitive, Conscious Living Coaching to guide you to your Soul-Purpose. www.illuminating-light.com • 508-818-0675 87 East Main Street, Norton, MA 02766
SCHOOLS OF WISDOM
ing Celebrat
I teach clients how to: • Clear energetic blocks • Trust their intuition • Take inspired action • Feel confident with every life and business decision
Holistic Practitioner and Professional, Earth Medicine, Angel Alignment, Wicca Akashic Soul Mastery, Hypnotherapy, Mediumship, and Animal Communication; Training for Reiki, IET, Gaiadon Heart, etc., plus workshops daily
ED LANGAN Master Mindset Coach Law of Attraction Expert
Personalized Mindset Coaching Can Change Your Life!
Psychic Channel For the Guides
Coaching sessions are by Zoom or by phone.
Are you feeling like you’re in your own way, blocked or stuck?
facebook.com/edlangan.byb info@EdwardLangan.com v 508 316-4574
Experience colon hydrotherapy in a safe, relaxed environment using state-of-the-art FDA registered equipment.
GIFT SHOP
womenofwisdominc.com 508-230-3680
EdwardLangan.com
Colon Hydrotherapy
Unique Jewelry G Healing Tools G Statues Crystal Bowls G Ritual Items G Angels Mediums or Psychic Readings Hours: M-F 10 am-8 pm, S/S 10 am-6 pm 118 Washington Street, N. Easton, MA
Ed helps heart centered entrepreneurs shift their mindset, create their vision, and manifest more clients, more revenue and more success using universal laws. Ed also teaches workshops. See website for details.
Stephanie Dumas I-ACT Certified Colon Hydrotherapist, Owner
Lexington Medical Building 16 Clarke Street, Lexington, MA Cleansing for the body, the mind, the spirit
stephanie@healthyspiritcleansing.com 781-860-5116
SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 57
Counseling and Therapy
PATH TO THE PRESENT Diane Spindler, LMHC, LMFT Healing and teaching for over 25 years h Relief of PTSD and depression h Elimination of phobias h Reduction of anxiety, panic attacks,
Psychotherapy clients have reached a point where they know why they feel badly, but don’t know how to release these bad feelings that keep them attached to their old stories and in the past. Using Gentle Reprocessing and other leading edge therapies, I help clients let go of these old stories so they can move on to a happier future. If you’re a veteran, a first responder, a victim of physical, mental, or sexual abuse, a victim of a disaster, a person with a traumatic background, a person who has anger issues, or a person who is afraid of public speaking, this process could be for you. h 508-886-0007 h
unexplained body pain, nightmares, flashbacks, and dissociation
Holistic Counseling Concepts Trish Whynot, D.C.Ed. Doctor of CORE Education Author of “Why Me? Why Now? WHY NOT? Finding opportunity in your obstacles.” Dr. Trish Whynot’s approach is a blending of personal growth and spiritual wisdom incorporating ASAT™ C.O.R.E. Counseling, meditative techniques, and wise guidance that comes through the Mineral Kingdom.
Holistic Psychotherapy Lori Miller-Freitas, LICSW Get to the core — Transform your life! You are on this earth to be happy and realize your true potential.
www.GentleReprocessing.com
Get to the root of physical, social and financial problems. G Learn approaches to living and loving that expect opportunities even during challenging times. G Thrive on the wisdom, compassion and understanding gained from life experiences and open to an array of extraordinary futures. G
“What impressed me about Dr. Trish Whynot was her ability to see through the chaos of life’s web and identify the root cause of any problem.” — Bob Olson, Afterlifetv.com Workshops and Sessions Available In Office, Phone or Skype Pittsfield and Windham, NH trish@trishwhynot.com www.TrishWhynot.com G 978-314-4545
Brainspotting A neurobiological tool for releasing traumatic/emotionally-charged issues within the brain. Holistic Psychotherapy Clinical Consultation Using extensive professional experience to resolve issues related to: Trauma, Grief, PTSD, Anxiety and Phobias.
EMDR R BSP R Hypnosis R Reiki
Certifications: LICSW, EMDRIA Approved Consultant, National Board of Certified Clinical Hypnotherapists. Visa/MC acccepted.
I use a combination of traditional, body centered and energy therapies to increase the speed and deepen the level of holistic healing.
294 Pleasant St. R Ste. 103B R Stoughton, MA www.eaglespirittherapies.com 781-297-2003
Counseling and Therapy
Holistic Counseling Services, LLC Kerri Morrison integrates mental health supports, holistic healing tools, and intuitive education for both private clients and the community into her practice. She has helped hundreds of individuals improve the quality of their life, self-confidence, and their relationships. Kerri believes healing and growth are always possible, and when people are ready, they can “awaken” to their true potential. Office is located in Newburyport, MA 978-255-7893 u awakenhcs.com
58 Spirit of Change SPRING/SUMMER 2021
Additional Non-Therapy Offerings • $25–“Journey to Awakening” E-Course • Monthly community education workshops and trainings • Deliberate Dating education programs • Holistic Life-Alignment Coaching Specialty in working with Highly Sensitive People (HSP)/Empaths Non-medication-based approaches centered in mind-body-spirit alignment & energy psychology Services are for individuals, couples, and families. In-person OR virtual Free 15-minute phone consultations.
Barbara Madden Johnson
“Barbara has a unique gift. She really helped me find the person I was meant to be buried under the layers of what people wanted me to be.”
Certified Master Hypnotist NLP Practitioner Energy Medicine Practitioner
You can do this. You can find peace of mind. You can make positive changes permanent. You can heal your body, mind, and soul. You may not know how to connect to the part of you that knows the way, but that part of you is still in you. Barbara will help you reconnect and guide you on your unique healing path.
Barbara brings a rich blend of deep experience as a clinician, clinical supervisor, college administrator, and professor. She helps individuals resolve health issues, including learning disabilities, dyslexia, immune and auto-immune diseases, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and depression, as well as issues relating to career, identity, relationships, and more recently, gender identification.
Center of the Heart Whole Health Integration
Joan Holzman, Psy. D.
I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear. — Rosa Parks
• Licensed Mental Health Counselor Holistic Coach • Community Educator • Certified Reiki Practitioner • Trauma-Informed EFT “Tapping” Practitioner • MA State Rep and Director at Large with the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP)
Lic. Psychologist, Lic. Marriage and Family Therapist Dance/Movement Therapist From the time we are very young we take life’s experiences to heart. Over time we may forget our core, hurts and feelings, but they remain with us. Our heartfelt experiences help shape our sense of self and our interactions with others.
– Sheryl C., Boston, MA
Be at your creative potential now. Barbara Madden Johnson, MA, CAGS, LPC 617-484-1716 u UcanEmerge@aol.com
I offer a variety of modalities such as: EMDR, Sandtray Therapy, Relaxation Techniques, Therapeutic Movement & Psychotherapy to help heal our core issues and attain a more integrated sense of health and well being. I look forward to meeting you. Client Comments: s Sandtray – “Sand tray therapy helped me see my life more clearly.” s EMDR – “I had insights I never had before.” s Therapeutic Movement – “It was great to feel the freedom in my body after working with you.” 42 Thoreau Street, Concord, MA 01742 978-369-6138
Consciousness Transformation Andrea Seiver, Ph.D. Channeled Readings Classes Have you spoken with an ascended master recently? Vywamus, channeled by Andrea Seiver, is a master and teacher who is working to help all humans make theshift into the higher levels of consciousness. Readings with Vywamus cover your life work, relationships, past lives, and other
The Free Universal Spirit Is the Teaching of the Love for God and Neighbor toward People, Nature and Animals
Other Classes: Learn to Channel • Advanced Channeling For information, contact Andrea at 617-332-1541 • www.andreaseiver.com Available Now! The Next Big Bang: The Explosion of Human Consciousness A Vywamus Book Read more at www.andreaseiver.com
Recognize and Heal Yourself through the Power of the Spirit The human being is an energy field of the Spirit. Thus, each person can make use of the absolutely positive power of the Spirit of God in his life – with illness or to stay healthy. Many practical indications with certain illnesses are given. We learn that the Spirit of God is the “fuel,” the energy for soul and physical body, and about selfhealing through the power of the Spirit – and much, much more. www.Gabriele-Publishing-House.com / Amazon.com 384 pp., HB, Order No. S102en • 1-844-576-0937 P.O. Box 2221, Deering, NH 03244
R Minerals and Jewelry R Top Quality Selection R Weekly Classes R Guest Presenters R Available for Rental R Meditations and Workshops
Crystals & Wellness Space
489 Mass. Ave., Arlington, MA 1 – 4 pm daily Kyle@CrystalConcentrics.com
Kyle Russell, Founder
617-771-5119 R PortalCrystalGallery.com
Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success — Dr. Joyce Brothers
www.spiritofchange.org
Bringing complimentary and alternative care to our community...
issues with his characteristic warmth, humor, and practical advice. Channeled Classes and Spiritual Tutoring help you personally evolve and begin to live in a state of higher consciousness. Evenings with Vywamus: Enjoy discussion evenings with Vywamus, contact Andrea for next dates.
Crystals
Portal Crystal Gallery
Healing and Bodywork We are a dedicated and professional group of practitioners providing compassionate care to assist our clients on their journey to wellness. Acupuncture o Reflexology o Cupping Massage (over 10 types, including prenatal!)
18 North Meadows Rd, Unit 12B, Medfield, MA
Gua Sha o TuiNa o Therapeutic Ultrasound
holisticwellnesscenter.org | 508-359-7400 Now located in the Medfield Crossing Shopping Plaza on Route 27
Holistic Health Coaching and more!
©
Libby Barnett, MSW, RMT Awaken Your Healing Touch Libby is a gifted, knowledgeable Reiki Master with 41 years experience. Libby learned Reiki from John Harvey Gray in 1979, and is the longest practicing Reiki Master Teacher on the East Coast. Her book, Reiki Energy Medicine, Bringing Healing Touch into Home, Hospital, and Hospice has sold over 75,000 copies in five languages. Use Reiki to create more joy, ease, and happiness. Let Libby’s warm, heartcentered approach help you take your next step toward self-love and inner peace. Reiki brings balance and harmony, supporting you doing the work you were born to do. Reiki facilitates transitions, promotes creativity and wisdom, and accelerates spiritual growth, helping you manifest your magnificence. Libby has been teaching Reiki at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health for 15 years. She has taught medical and nursing students at Harvard, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Brown, Tufts, and Yale, as well as staff at Mass General, Brigham and Women’s, Beth Israel, Mt. Auburn, Emerson, Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Southern New Hampshire, New York Columbia Presbyterian hospitals, and social workers at the University of Maryland. Libby was featured in a Reiki segment for the PBS nationally televised series, Body and Soul. “Libby has a beautiful way of teaching and creates a perfect atmosphere for healing and learning.” One of Libby’s passions is teaching hospice staff and volunteers. Fueled by Reiki energy, their healing touch is
Reiki o IET o Polarity
…and if that isn’t enough, crystals & gifts too!
enhanced, creating greater effectiveness in calming agitation, soothing pain and providing comfort. In class, a powerful slide presentation captures the essence of Reiki and highlights the latest research. Reiki stories from Libby’s extensive experience will uplift and inspire you, showing how anyone can learn Reiki. You receive attunements and practice giving and receiving Reiki. You leave class with an illustrated notebook, certificate, and Reiki pin, fully trained and certified to do Reiki on yourself, family, friends, and animals. “Hands on, Reiki’s on.” "My commitment to teach the Usui System of Reiki Healing in the authentic, traditional manner inspired me to visit Japan to retrace the roots of Reiki. I am dedicated to teaching this sacred healing art to promote health and conscious living on the planet. I invite you to give yourself the gift of Reiki. It is an easy, effective self-care tool to love, heal, and empower yourself. I look forward to meeting you and sharing Reiki.”
All 2021 classes are offered virtually via Zoom: Reiki I: March 6, May 15, July 17, or September 18 Reiki II Class on day following Reiki I Class; Taking Reiki I and Reiki II back to back is encouraged. Reiki Master Class: April 10, July 17, or October 2 Graduates of other Reiki teachers welcome. Additional Reiki training dates can be found at: www.reikienergy.com All credit cards accepted. Social Work, Nursing and Massage contact hours/CEU’s available. Reiki Master Teacher Training info available on request. To register or for more information: reikienergy.com reiki@reikienergy.com • 603-654-2787
SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | Spirit of Change 59
Healing and Bodywork • •
Are you feeling frustrated or overwhelmed by responsibilities and uncontrollable disruptions? Are you looking for practices to release unhealthy energy in ways that bring joy to your heart? Did you know that Nature is our best ally against all the toxic stuff? Earth Walkers leads people on healing journeys to fully experience nature in more spiritual ways. Guided experiences and opportunities include: • Nature Walks
Hands-on Classes (Mindfulness, Herb, Plant Identification, Plant Spirit, Native Plants and more) Nature Rejuvenation Therapy (working with women to assist them with restoring their body + spirit)
When you journey with Earth Walkers you will experience: • Improved physical + emotional health • Reduced stress • More joy • New outlets for creative expression • Deeper inner connection • And SO MUCH MORE Amy Melissa Witt, Horticulturalist, Naturalist, Educator and Director of Earth Walkers, has over 25 years of experience providing naturebased programs in southern Maine. www.earthwalkers.me amyearthwalkers@gmail.com Serving Southern Maine
Deborah is dedicated to the whole health and well-being of her clients. She brings a wealth of training, experience and practical, compassionate wisdom to every person, appointment, and class. WHAT HER CLIENTS SAY
DEBORAH STRAFUSS Reiki Master Teacher, Certified Spiritual Life Coach, SCR, CDP Healing Yourself Naturally with Reiki Crystal Reiki offers Reiki sessions, Reiki Training, and transformative Spiritual Coaching to support you in living your best life, Birth Healing and Land and Space clearing to provide healthy beginnings and environments for life.
“Your access to Spirit is divine, healing and magical.” – Sarah “Deborah … gently offered her insight and provided tools to help me turn my mindset from frustration to acceptance.” – Jeni ONLINE AND COVID-SAFE IN-PERSON SESSIONS AVAILABLE
Find Crystal Reiki at The Gentle Place Wellness Center in Framingham, MA R 508-353-5136 R
www.CrystalReikiEnergy.com
Healing: Combined Modalities Body Balancing Center bringing body, mind and spirit into balance
COLON HYDROTHERAPY Detox with state of the art “Open System” providing complete privacy. F I-ACT and National Board certified. ENERGY HEALING Therapy Emotion and Body Code, Energy Codes and Bio Energetic Synchronization Technique, Psych-K, NLP and more...
www.BodyBalancingCenter.com Text or call 508-868-3624 info@BodyBalancingCenter.com
60 Spirit of Change SPRING/SUMMER 2021
DETOX & CLEANSE With Infrared Thera Sauna, Q2 Ionic Foot bath, BEMER MASSAGE THERAPY
Healing: Combined Modalities
intuitive HEALING
Wendy Marks
M.Ed, C.A.S., FAPA R Medical intuitive sessions, energy heal-
ing and integrative therapy R 30 years of experience in traditional and
complementary healthcare
SACRED RESONANCE HEALING Bena Phillipo EM Level 4 Practitioner Holy Fire III Karuna Reiki Master/Teacher
SESSIONS AND CLASSES • Distance Healing Sessions using EM and Reiki with flexible times offered • Geobiology Land Clearing for home and property • Reiki Shares usually fall on the second Saturday of the month. They should resume in summer. ON SITE CLASSES • Holy Fire III, Reiki I & II Class June 5th & 6th, 2021 • Holy Fire III, Master/Teacher Class July 9th - 11th, 2021 • Holy Fire III, Karuna Master Class September 10th - 12th, 2021 Exploring the healing arts in the San Francisco bay area, I came upon many practitioners who used a variety of modalities. Some combined different techniques in a single session, which worked well for me. Knowing this, I went on to learn many different healing modalities: Chi Nei Tsang, Shiatsu, Reflexology, Craniosacral Therapy,
R Improve your physical, mental, and
spiritual health R Works with individuals to develop their
own intuitive skills “By healing ourselves we create changes that have a ripple effect on the world around us.” Looking for practical guidance to create your own spiritual path? You’ll find it in Wendy’s book Your Soul’s Companion, available on her website and at amazon.com. www.wendymarks.com R 781-449-5368 wlm922@wendymarks.com
Reiki and my latest healing modality is EM. I have had great success combining these in various ways. Holy Fire Reiki is a new form of Reiki, the energy comes directly from source and most who experience it find it to be stronger than other forms of Reiki. Attunements are replaced by Ignitions and the energy flows directly form Source, as we relinquish control over Reiki energy, we also gain free will to use it. Craniosacral Therapy using the light touch of CST one uses their hands to diagnose and treat distortions and dysfunctions along the spinal cord. Using soft touch techniques, we release the restrictions in the tissues around the craniosacral system. EM is a healing energy medicine that combines ancient Chinese systems of acupuncture and feng shui with modern knowledge of physics and anatomy. EM allows practitioners to diagnose and treat people over long distances, tapping into Universal Qi for diagnosing and treating western diseases and balancing eastern flows. Sacred Resonance Healing 43 Highland St., Southborough, MA 01772 508-303-0366 • SacredResonanceHealing.com Bena@SacredResonanceHealing.com
Herbal Healing RACHEL ROSS, APRN, CNM
HILLSIDE HERBALS
~ Family Wellness with Herbs ~ Find herbal solutions for the whole family Shop: by appointment. Download catalog. Custom preparations also available by appointment.
HOLISTIC WOMEN’S HEALTH
Services include functional medicine testing and well-woman gynecological care.
New: Join my online discount quality pharmacy; Fullscript.com Use my name to create an account. Get 15% off your favorite brands
206 Worcester Road #35, Princeton, MA 01541 508-827-2733 k holisticwomanshealth.com
206 Worcester Road #35, Princeton, MA 01541 508-847-8615 k hillsideherbals.com
Homeopathy Experience the Healing Energy of
Homeopathy ABBY BEALE, CCH RSHom(NA) Are you looking for a smarter way to heal your body from nagging chronic issues?
Homeopathic care is holistic and individualized, taking into account all of who you are and how you experience life – mentally, emotionally, and physically.
Whether it’s depression, anxiety, women’s issues, digestive troubles, child behavior problems, or more, know that homeopathy works with your body to relieve symptoms, restore vitality, and improve your overall health. Ask about Tea with a Homeopath events or beginner study groups. All appointments currently online only. ABBY BEALE, CCH RSHOM(NA) homeopathyhealings@gmail.com HomeopathyHealings.com k 413-426-1024
Natural Products COZY SHEEPSKINS FOR EVERYDAY LIFE
SHEEPSKIN
MAMA
Ethically Sourced Sheepskins
• White & Colorful, all textures • Kundalini Yoga & Healing Reiki • Babies & Furry friends love them! • Guru Dev Yogic Healing Oils SHEEPSKINMAMA.COM INFO@SHEEPSKINMAMA.COM
Nutrition I CAN HELP YOU:
BETH COLON, M.S., BCHN Nutrition Counselor Board Certified in Holistic Nutrition
Come on a journey with me to improve your health with holistic nutrition.
Relieve digestive issues such as IBS and GERD Stop unhealthy eating practices Curb sugar and carb addictions while improving your A1C numbers Enhance your health with nutritional cleansing.
978-340-0448 HolisticNutritionServices.com
Readings Nancy Johansen RN, CCH, RMT
Connecting you with your Angelic Dream Team, creating your Happily Ever After Angel Readings S Past Life Regression Angel Therapy® S Reiki S Hypnotherapy
at Angeltouche
Soulful Life Coaching Psychic Intuitive S Angel Therapy Practitioner ®
www.spiritofchange.org
Private sessions in person or distance by phone and e-mail. Classes and workshops ~ Franklin, MA Nancy@Angeltouche.com www.Angeltouche.com S 508-577-4552
Readings
Connecting to Spirit for inspiration, sustenance and support for your life’s journey Nancy guides you into a connection with spirit and your soul for guidance, healing and direction. Connect with a loved one who has passed or receive Soul messages in a session with Nancy. Ask about package discounts and mentoring relationships.
SOUL ART Nancy offers sessions in the Akashic Records to open to your Soul. She will sketch while she reads. You will receive your art a couple weeks later. SOUL ART MENTORING Nancy Also offers Soul Art Mentoring over a period of time. This mentoring includes Akashic healing work, sketches to help you on your way, and a final piece of art that commemorates your Journey and gives you a vision of you on your Soul’s path.
READINGS AND SESSIONS IN
Spiritual mediumship Spirit portraits of loved ones in Spirit F Akashic record life readings F Group sessions and classes F Akashic Training F Soul Art F F
Interested in finding out more about training or mentorship? Contact Nancy for a FREE discovery session 978-835-0005 F nancy@angelscapes.net Haverhill, MA F angelscapes.net
Spiritual Practices The Greater Boston Church of Spiritualism ARLINGTON MASONIC TEMPLE 19 Academy St., Arlington, MA (off Mass Ave., easy access by T via Harvard Sq.) The Greater Boston Church of Spiritualism embraces a religious and spiritual belief blending ancient wisdom with contemporary thought. Services are held at 10:30 am every Sunday, with mediumship, live music, inspirational talks, and healing by laying on of hands.
When we change... the world changes. Methods of achieving stability and clarity of mind become more and more essential as our social, political, and economic structures change dramatically. Raja Yoga is a simple but powerful form of meditation that can help you to develop peace of mind, resilience, and inner strength. The Brahma Kumaris is a worldwide spiritual organization, affiliated with the UN and recipient of seven Peace Messenger awards. Classes include meditation and a range of other practical tools for selftransformation. Workshops, group meditations, and retreats are held regularly. All activities are offered free of charge, as a community service.
As an evolving spiritual community, The Greater Boston Church of Spiritualism offers weekday evening classes in mediumship, healing, and meditation; mediums days are the last Sunday of the month; and seminars and workshops through the year. For a brochure with upcoming events, or to speak with the Pastor, call us. Visit our website for current events or more information. An affiliate of the Spiritualists United Network (SUN) and the International Spiritualist Federation
Our mailing address: 40-44 Spring St., Watertown, MA 02472 617-923-4334 GreaterBostonChurchofSpiritualism.com
b Brahma Kumaris Learning Center for Peace
75 Common St, Watertown, MA 617-926-1230 • bknewengland.org boston@us.brahmakumaris.org b Inner Space Meditation Center & Gallery
1110 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 617-547-1110 • innerspaceharvardsq.org info@innerspaceharvardsq.org b Shrewsbury @ ATFS Center
433 South St, Shrewsbury, MA 617-926-1230 shrewsbury@bknewengland.org b Providence
123 North Main St, Providence, RI 401-354-2693 providence@bknewengland.org b Manchester
575 W. Willow St, Ste 209, Manchester, NH 603-622-5500 manchester@bknewengland.org
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Academy for Soul Healing......................4 Alternatives for Health..........................17 Angels Teach...........................................25 Angelscapes....................................... 45,61 Angeltouche............................................61 Arvigo Therapy.......................................15 Ascend Hospice......................................63
NE Institute of Reflexology...................56 O
Index of Advertisers
B Balance Within.......................................15 Libby Barnett...........................................59 Beadniks..................................................47 Abby Beale...............................................61 Bhavna’s Wellness Group.......................39 Body Balancing Center..........................60 Boston School of Herbal Studies, The.............................................57 Brahma Kumaris.....................................61
Spring/Summer 2021
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Earth Walkers..........................................60 Eclectic Institute of Aromatherapy andHerbal Studies, The..........................56 Enchanted Fox........................................34 F FrogPond Yoga Centre...........................47 Anne-Marie Freyer.................................15 G Gabrielle Publishing House..................59 Gemstone Therapy Institute.............. 7,56 Arthur Gertler.........................................41 Greater Boston Church of Spiritualism.............................................61 Groton Wellness Center........................37 Gracelyn Guyol.......................................49
Bonnie Page.............................................11 Path to the Present.................................58 Pets and Spirits........................................49 Phoenix Rising Healing...........................4 Monique Pommier.................................56 Portal Crystal Gallery............................59 Pyramid Books.......................................33
Maryann Roefaro...................................11
Cambridge Health Alliance...................17 Lisa Campbell.........................................35 CBD Rhode Island..................................15 Celtic Art Therapy............................ 35,63 Circles of Wisdom....................................7 Coleman Natural Vision........................27 Core Connection, The............................41 Crystal Reiki............................................47
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Nikki Davis..............................................11 Dinno Health Acton Pharmacy............17
Ocean Oracle...........................................39 Olson Media Group........................... 4,27 Opening Lotus Yoga...............................47 Optimism Plus........................................37
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Harmony Integrative Bodywork...........47 Healing from the Body Level Up..........64 Healthy Spirit..........................................57 Heaven and Earth Studio.........................3 Helfand Retreats.....................................40 Hillside Herbals......................................60 Holistic Nutrition Services....................61 Holistic Wellness Center................. 31,59 Joan Holzman.........................................58
Pat LeBau.......................................... 47, 43 Light Unlimited......................................19 Eric Linter................................................56 Lotus Flower Living...............................47 LoveLight Illuminations........................25
I Illuminating Light Healing Center........................................57 Inner Traditions......................................17 J Barbara Johnson.....................................58 K Amanda Kugler.......................................41
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HandTales................................................51
Ed Langan................................................57
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M M.A.S.H............................................. 13,51 Maha Yoga Center..................................47 Kristen Mara...........................................37 Tina Marian.............................................51 Wendy Marks..........................................60 Massachusetts Satsang Society..............51 Massage Envy............................................2 Carolyn McGee................................. 47,57 Lori Miller-Freitas..................................58 Mon-Shui.................................................35 Kerri Morrison........................................58 Mountainbrook Yoga.............................47
Sacred Resonance............................ 13, 60 Science of Spirituality............................37 Sea Glass Yoga & Wellness............... 7, 47 Andrea Seiver..........................................59 Sheepskin Mama....................................61 Sohum Yoga.............................................47 Spa Tech...................................................56 Spiral Arts................................................57 Spirit Hollow.............................................7 Maureen St. Germain.............................45 Stephanie Jane Inspirations...................34 Sturbridge Herbfest................................43 T Talas Art...................................................11 Yves-Samuel Tanguay....................... 33,41 Touchstone Community School.... 40, 57 V Vesta.........................................................27 W Way to Balance,The..................................5 Wellness Roundtable, The.....................34 Trish Whynot..........................................58 Anne-Marie Freyer Wiboltt..................15 Women of Wisdom......................... 31, 57 Worcester Yoga.......................................47 Wu Healing Center.................................29
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Kathleen Nagy.........................................40 Natural Living Expo.................................9
Yoga Anita...............................................47 Your Health Matters...............................49
Directory of
Holistic Specialties ANIMAL SERVICES
MASH Integrative Veterinary Care, since 1982. Dr. Margo Roman & Associates. 508-435-4077. Hopkinton, MA. MashVet.com
ASTROLOGY
Eric Linter, over 25 years experience.
Readings, classes, daily forecast. stars@ericlinter.com. 508-541-4115.
CRYSTALS
Portal Crystal Gallery, 489 Mass. Ave, Arlington Center, MA. Open 7 days 1-4pm. 617-771-5119. Kyle@PortalCrystalGallery.com.
EMF PROTECTION
The Rejuvenizer®, protection from
EMFs and other damaging frequencies. Strengthens the immune system. www.lighthealing.com. 512-301-2999
EM Healing
Sacred Resonance Healing. Bena
Phillipo, EM Level 4 practitioner. Holy Fire III Karuna Reiki Master/Teacher. Southborough, MA. and remote. www.SacredResonanceHealing.com.
HOMEOPATHY
Abby Beale, CCH. Certified in classical
homeopathy. Online and in person. Homeopathy relieves symptoms and restores vitality naturally. HomeopathyHealings.com
HYPERBARIC OXYGEN THERAPY
Hyperbaric Vermont Oxygen Therapy
offers treatment and chamber sales for home use. www.communityhyperbaric.com. 802-472-8900.
MEDICAL INTUITIVE
ASTROLOGY
SPIRITUAL SINGLES
Sue Singleton, Nearly 30 years, 9,000+
readings. Incomparable detail, accuracy and action plan. Compassionate advanced healing restores health. 978-834-0341. TheWayToBalance.com/ medical-intuitive-readings. Intuitive Healing with Wendy Marks
Over 25 years, with long-term chronic problems a specialty. Very effective with finding root issues. Compassionate and committed. www.wendymarks. com, 781-449-5368.
PAIN RELIEF
Pat Lebau, MA, ERYT-500, Kripalu Yoga teacher, offers Integrated Positional Therapy sessions. PatLebauyoga.com
READINGS
Nancy Smith, spiritual medium and Akashic life readings. 978-835-0005. www.angelscapes.net
REIKI
Holy Fire III Training. Women of
Wisdom. Katie Malloy Ramaci. Holy Fire III Advanced/RMT. 508-230-3680. Womenofwisdominc.com
YOUR DAILY READING.
Visit spiritofchange.org for astrologer Eric Linter's daily word.
DOWSING All About Dowsing. Discover the science of Dowsing. Self-instructional DVD's and Books. Home of the Original Cameron Aurameter. www.dowsing.com. (805) 649-5721. Catalog: PO Box 30305, Santa Barbara, CA 93130.
HOLISTIC SKIN CARE Tahdah Garden Colors presents natural blush, eye shadows, skin care. Soft colors. Natural alternatives. Ingredients from plants and your garden. Sales, brochures, DVD. Inquire JMarkarian0235@charter.net. (508) 799-0235
LABYRINTHS
518-589-5000. www.peacevillageretreat.org
Ann Bissanti, CYT. Over 30 years experience Iyengar yoga. 508-829-6300. worcesteryogacenter.com
One Body Nutrition Specializing in all vitamins, minerals, herbs, amino acids, proteins, sports nutrition, weight management, and lifeextension formulas. Get 20% off with coupon code “spiritofchange”. www.OneBodyNutrition.net You Only Get One!
VOLUNTEER
Visit our website to learn more about our specialized hospice care and services AscendHospice.com
Brahma Kumaris Peace Village Retreat Center. Haines Falls, NY.
Worcester Yoga Center.
VITAMINS AND SUPPLEMENTS
Contact one of our Volunteer Supervisors for more information Jennifer.Fenuccio@ascendhealth.com Kelly.Bollman@ascend.com 508-229-8390
RETREAT CENTERS
YOGA
Ready for a conscious, evolved relationship? Our amazing members value spiritual growth, yoga, meditation and sustainable living. 21 years online! Join now — Meet your soulmate. www.SpiritualSingles.com.
Make a Difference and Become an Ascend Hospice Volunteer in Massachusetts
Libby Barnett, MSW, MSW, Reiki Master Teacher and author. 41 years Reiki experience. 603-654-2787 www.reikienergy.com. CEU’s.
List on this page. Email advertise@spiritofchange.org
www.spiritofchange.org
Classifieds
WORKSHOPS SPIRITUAL GOODS Mystical Banners. Hand painted wall hangings and altar cloths. Sacred symbols, angels, mantras and mandalas. Divine designs with a magickal twist! Please visit https://www.etsy.com/shop/MysticalBanners.
Restore For Life, Light Touch Therapy. Restore is an original light touch therapy that reconnects, regenerates and restores better brain and body functioning through your neurological system, allowing you to have more abilities, health and a better quality of life on all levels. When you are seeking a healthy lifestyle or facing health challenges creating, better body function is important. We offer 2 online workshops at RestoreforLife.com
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