--freedom now--
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How deep is the sea?.. Freedom has always fascinated me. I love the smell of the word. I like its sense of possibility. I taste freedom when I listen to the music of Aaron Copland – music that could only have been written in a country which once had vast prairies and seemingly infinite wilderness. I feel it in my body when I run along cliffs in the rain. I rejoice in the sense of it that comes when, after hours of shifting dead words and sentences, something suddenly comes alive and beauty spills out all over the page.

In an outer way, to be free means to enjoy liberty of action under a government that is not despotic and does not encroach on individual human rights. In an inner way to be free means becoming liberated from the relentless forces of doubt, self-criticism and fear which we all inherit growing up in emotional and educational environments which split our mind from our body and teach us not to trust ourselves. They teach us to put our faith in "experts". They teach us neither to honor the splendor of the individual human soul, nor do they tell us that the universe is filled with compassion which we can draw on whenever we need support and power which we can direct to create whatever we want. Learning simple shamanic techniques for expanding consciousness can not only help you tap into creativity, healing, and authentic spiritual experience. In many ways even more important, practicing these techniques, leads to a natural alignment of the inner being or soul of a person and his or her outer personality which lies at the very core of experiencing true freedom in every area of your life.

Like the proverbial iceberg, most of us live with the lion’s share of our potential for freedom, joy, creativity and power submerged beneath a sea of unknowing. We go about our day to day duties and pleasures conscious only of what comes to us through our five senses. How does it taste and feel? What does it sound like? What do we see in front of our eyes? Meanwhile beneath the vast ocean of consciousness that constitutes what it is to be fully human our greater selves hibernate waiting to be awakened. Too often we live our lives from far too narrow a perspective and then wonder why we feel imprisoned.

Gary Zukav, author of Authentic Power, believes that we are no longer five sensory beings evolving through our exploration of the physical world. We are, he insists, evolving into a multi-sensory species, men and women no longer limited to five sensory perception. In the process we are beginning to turn away from our fascination with external power, to replace it with the kind of authentic creative power that comes from building a bridge between the individual soul and the outer personality. I agree with him wholeheartedly. And it is this evolution which lies at the core of my own approach to shamanic work which I now teach in my Journey to Freedom workshops throughout the world.

seeds of the soul

Each human being is utterly unique. Like the seed of a plant which has encoded within its genetic material the potential for everything it can become as a full blown flower, each of us comes into this world carrying a package of as yet unrealized potential for energy, health, creativity and joy. It is physical, psychological and spiritual potential which creates our uniqueness. The fullest expression of it leads to the fullest experience of authentic freedom. It is rather like the brushstroke a zen painter uses to represent a single leaf on a shaft of bamboo. The leaf he paints is totally singular – like no other leaf that has ever existed. Yet within its uniqueness is encompassed universal beauty and life energy of the highest order. So it is with each of us.

Within the individual genetic package which is you is nestled your very own brand of seedpower – an essential soul energy that encompasses far greater physical, creative and spiritual potential than you could ever hope to realize in one life time. The more fully this seedpower is allowed to unfold the richer your experience of authentic power and freedom will be. So focused is the energy of spirit within a tiny seed that it opens and reaches towards the light, regardless of what is in its way. Once I pulled up a weed growing in my garden to discover within its roots a marble that had been crushed out of all recognition by the life-force of the growing plant.

The wonderful thing about any little seed is that it doesn’t take much for it to develop into the plant it is designed to be: some good rich organic soil, a little rain and a dose of sunlight. For the power and the intelligence that makes growth possible lies not outside of it but within the seed itself. People – you and me, and the woman you saw when you got on the bus this morning - are just like plants. All we need is a good healthy environment which allows our unfolding to take place.

painful distortions

The problem is that few of us get it. For as we are unfolding - as we are passing through the superbly orchestrated phases of our physical and spiritual development - more often than not our environment does not provide the rich soil, clean water and sunlight we need for full unfolding. More often than not it truncates our development. Then, like a little plant trying to push through depleted soil with too little water and not enough sunlight our growth becomes stunted or twisted. Or like a seedling trying to push through earth with a stone on top of it we develop ‘distortions’.

All sorts of things can cause distortions: accidents, illnesses, emotional or physical abuse. Even being raised in a wonderful family if you happen to be a ‘fish’ and the rest of your family are ‘ducks’. Distortions can be physical in nature - a sunken chest or an excess of fat which our bodies create as a cushion against a harsh world around us. They can also be emotional, leaving us with a sense that there is something wrong with us, that we cannot rely on our judgment, that we are unworthy, or incompetent or guilty even though we may have no idea why or how. And they can be spiritual. When we grow up in an environment which lacks an awareness of the interconnectedness of all life, when we feel ourselves to be isolated and living in a boxed-in world of the five senses, then we can end up with a nihilistic sense of life. We feel we have nowhere to go, nothing to do and no purpose in remaining alive.

powerful values

That’s the bad news. The good news is that, because of the enormous capacity of a living organism to heal itself, most of these distortions can be cleared through such practices as detoxifying the body, through meditation, through shamanic work that brings you closer and closer to your soul enabling you to tap into freedom and release potential energy. You feel like you are connected to life with your whole being. You are no longer trapped within what Alan Watts used to call ‘a skin-encapsulated ego’. This gives you easier access to some of the submerged iceberg of your being where creative power and joy live. Most of the time you feel unencumbered by your past, no longer constrained by other people’s ideas or pressures from your education or your religious and family origins. You experience life from moment to moment and life is something you feel safe enough to risk living to the full.

Our longing for freedom asks that we reconnect with our instincts too, for instinct is the voice of the multi-sensory quantum realms. In short, it asks that we come home to ourselves. You can do this without drugs, without gurus, without becoming a disciple or having to belong to any privileged group. You can do it regardless of your age, your physical condition or your religious beliefs. Freedom becomes part of your day to day experience as soon as you are ready to:

I find that shamanic techniques directed towards expanding awareness and connecting soul with personality so each becomes a reflection of the other bring people home to that sense of bliss and wholeness which we all know should be in our lives but which we often experience only fleetingly. It is a process that depends on learning simple-to-practice skills that give you direct access to the wisdom that lies within you by awakening which I call the consciousness matrix and putting it into practice in your life.

activating the matrix

The consciousness matrix is the facility which we all have that gives us access to the quantum realms of multidimensional reality. It is like an interface encoded within your physical body, probably within our DNA or in your energy field. It is using this matrix that enabled Einstein to see himself riding on a beam of light, and led to the formulation of his theory of relativity. It was this matrix that made it possible for Blake to write his poetry and etch his pictures, and for Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton to transform our world by introducing us to their expanded perceptions of reality.

Man, in his search for freedom, has developed hundreds of ways of activating the consciousness matrix throughout the ages. The matrix has been used by artists, scientists, mystics, prophets and saints as well as healers, poets, myth-makers and visionaries to make the silent passage into luminous realms. These methods range from physical means such as yoga, fasting, intense physical exertion and breathing techniques to mental practices like meditation, prayer and active imagination. Some activate the matrix by the use of consciousness-altering substances from LSD to ayahuasca – the plants used by natives of the Upper Amazon. Others make use of ritual, alchemy, or magic. Yet, go back far enough and you will find that every one of these methods has one way or another developed out of shamanism. And shamanic techniques are the most simple, effective and powerful methods for activating the consciousness matrix in each of us and putting it to work in helping us become more fully who we really are and bring the unique gifts we have to bring to the world. Even more important: they can be learned by anybody.

direct line to quantum reality

Shamanism is nothing more than a direct method for expanding consciousness. It consists of a collection of simple techniques for accessing energy, power, vision, healing and creativity. It is neither a religion nor a philosophy. Pre-religious, pre-political and pre-philosophical in nature, shamanism is a highly democratic methodology which gives you direct access to revelations and spiritual experiences unmediated by restricting worldviews or organized religion. It requires no guru, no priest, no religious hierarchy to intervene on your behalf. I think this is one of the reasons some people are afraid of it. For since shamanic methods connect you directly to spiritual power and healing they create an experience of autonomy and independence in the person using them. Shamanic methods put authority back in the hands of the individual. As such they undermine whatever structures of church or state that imprison us because neither is wide enough to embrace the power of the human spirit. Now this is dangerous stuff. Nothing short of revolutionary. So old are shamanic practices that the knowledge of these methods seem to be encoded within our genes. I am no longer surprised when teaching these techniques to find my students report "but it is like remembering something I have always known – like being a child again – like coming home."

Shamanism is also very down to earth. Practicing shamanic techniques brings you, not an intellectual understanding of the spiritual, but an experience of it. Shamanic practices developed long before spiritual experiences became beaurocratised and formalized into religious dogma. Long before established political systems and religions, shamanism grew not out of ideology, but out of practice. It is highly pragmatic. Its techniques have been used for at least 30,000 to 50,000 years by people all over the world. Why? Because they work.

Tribal groups relied on the shaman who journeyed into quantum realms on their behalf. He went for healing, for guidance and wisdom when challenges and crises arose for vision about where best to hunt or how best to plan for the winter. Shamanism predates the world’s great religions. In fact shamanic practices form the seedbed out of which civilization's religions and philosophies have been developed by pioneers who – either consciously or unconsciously – knew how to make use of their consciousness matrix to experience quantum awareness and then returned to codify what they had found there in words or paintings, dance or sculpture, mathematical formulae, music, or religious teachings.

awaken the giant

Now of course we no longer live in tribal cultures. The borders between peoples, between countries and between ritual practices have become blurred, and broken down. In some cases they have been obliterated altogether. Where our ancestors gathered around the fire of an evening to be dazzled by the mythic tales of the shaman and sink into the safety of a shared cosmology that brought meaning, television has become the ‘hearth’ around which we now sit. Our children are raised on the mythology of advertisers. They tell their tales with great skill and persuasion. Yet their stories, instead of nourishing us from numinous realms and empowering our lives, undermine our power and encourage us instead to place it in the hands of the commercial world that would have us believe that the only way we can be free is to consume what they are selling us.

Yes we live in different times. Yes we have different challenges. Our concerns are no longer those of locating an animal on the hunt or performing rituals that honor the gods and goddesses asking them to protect our people through winter. Today’s challenges are far greater. How for instance do we move forward as a global community faced with progressive extinction of animals and plant species on a massive scale. How do we live in a world burdened by massive debts? How do we recover our own power and experience our own freedom when the very political and economic systems we have created are structured in a way that makes us feel powerless? And finally how do we come face to face with earthshaking discoveries and dramatic shifts in worldview taking place as a result of findings filtering down from physics, astronomy, biology and consciousness research? These discoveries are not only wiping out our trust in every religious, moral and political philosophy we once clung to, they are quite literally turning our sense of reality upside down while providing us with nothing new in which to trust.

leap towards autonomy

For me the answer is simple. Yet it has only come from over 25 years spent searching, experimenting, learning, yearning, suffering and discovering: It is no longer appropriate for us to rely on outside ‘experts’ whether they be doctors, priests or politicians. We can listen to their words of course. But we can no longer follow them blindly as human beings have so often done in the past, fearful that if we did not behave like good children some misfortune might befall us. It is time we embraced our journey into individual maturity by learning to activate our own consciousness matrix. Doing so enables us to expand our limited three dimensional, five sensory minds into those of the multidimensional beings that we are meant to be. It is time we made the leap - each one of us - into our own power and our own freedom, to learn to build powerful bridges between the truth of our own soul and the expression of our personality. It is time we expanded our vision, helped to heal the wounds in ourselves, in others and our planet, that each of us explored the simple yet profound practices once known only by the great artists, scientists, and shamans and use them to become everything that each of us is destined to be. In the process, I believe, we will recover our power, experience our freedom and gain access to healing wisdom and vision of the highest order. Then, and only then will we be prepared together to meet the challenges that face us and take part in the communal process of reshaping our global future.

Ancient shamanic skills are surfacing in new forms. They are no longer the province of a few gifted people. They belong to us all. So let us pay respects to tribal cultures from the Inuit of the Arctic and Tamang of Nepal to the Sumatran Kubu and Native Americans giving thanks to them for having preserved living shamanic skills. Then let us then turn these skills - which belong not just to tribal groups but to all people – into power for life. We stand poised at a new millennium and it is high time we demystified the whole realm of shamanism and make its marvelous techniques available to all who want to use them to help us move forward into a new age. What greater freedom could we ask for.

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Journey to Freedom is a practical and highly personal course which marries the most ancient technique known for accessing power and expanding awareness - shamanism - together with tools from mythology, leading-edge physics, biology, systems theory and the rapidly developing science of consciousness itself to create a user-friendly, well-tested path to freedom. Journey to Freedom workshops offer you a technology for liberation. It is simple and practical. The skills you learn are like a rope you use to climb to the top of Freedom Mountain. Once you get there, you can throw the ropes away.