José Luis Stevens, PhD is the President and Co-Founder (with wife Lena) of Power Path Seminars, an international school and consulting firm dedicated to the study and application of shamanism and indigenous wisdom to business and everyday life. José completed a ten-year apprenticeship with a Huichol (Wixarika) Maracame (Huichol shaman) in the Sierras of Central Mexico. In addition, he is studying with Shipibo shamans in the Peruvian Amazon and with Paqos (shamans) in the Andes in Peru.
In 1983 he completed his doctoral dissertation at the California Institute of Integral Studies focusing on the interface between shamanism and western psychological counseling. Since then, he has studied cross-cultural shamanism around the world to distill the core elements of shamanic healing and practice. He is the author of twenty books and numerous articles including Encounters With Power; Awaken The Inner Shaman; The Power Path; Secrets of Shamanism; Transforming Your Dragons; and Praying With Power.
Once again, the USA is reeling from another mass shooting of children and teachers in a school setting. People are enraged that nothing has been done by lawmakers to meaningfully reduce the slaughter and many feel hopeless that anything will be done given the power of the weapons industry in the United States and the value placed on the private ownership of guns in the US.
In early May of 2022 I flew to the Amazon in Peru to lead a dieta, a plant diet supervised by the Shipibo people of the upper Amazon who are famous for their knowledge of plants, the songs of the plants, and their powers to transform us. This was perhaps my thirty-third diet over the last twenty-seven years, each diet seven days in all. Many of the plants require dieting three times for 21 days in all. I first began dieting with the plants in the mid 90’s and as I did so more and more people wanted to join me so that now, I and my wife Lena, and our daughter Anna often take around twenty people per trip. This group, composed of eleven mostly veterans was smaller than usual due to the still-present specter of COVID.
Miguel Ruiz, Toltec shaman and author of “The Four Agreements” includes “never making assumptions” as one of the four agreements to make with oneself for greater mastery in life. Unfortunately, most people have no idea what he is talking about.
Over the last several years I have written a number of articles that referenced infection and viral activity in relation to the pandemic that has been so impactful on our lives. In this article we will look past the pandemic in order to understand the immense choices that are available to us through viral activity.
Bullying has been around for tens of thousands of years. In other words, there is nothing new about bullying. What is it? Bullying is mistreating another by belittling, harming, hurting, and inflicting pain psychologically, emotionally, mentally, physically, and all the ways pain can be inflicted.
Earth, Air, Fire, and Water are the four building blocks of our physical planet and everything on it and together these four elements offer some stability to our experience. This is what this article focuses on. While these elements are powerhouses easily witnessed in the oceans and rivers, volcanoes and forest fires, tornados and hurricanes, earthquakes and avalanches, they are also present in subtle ways in every part of the planet from the makeup of our bodies to our energy needs, transportation, food, shelter and many other aspects. They are literally everywhere we look.
This next year is an important development in a short or long process of transformation, depending on how you see it. Everyone is reaching a state of saturation and exhaustion regarding the oncoming variants of the pandemic, the insane fascist politics, climate change, the spiraling levels of gun violence, drug addiction, self-destruction, and bad behavior. However, this is just the beginning not the end. This means that you cannot afford to be exhausted yet or you will not be able to see it through to the other side.
These are challenging changing times as is totally evident by a brief scan of the news and simply by noticing what the culture, society, and world are going through right now. The old order is crumbling and the new paradigm is still part of the unknown – the mystery of…
For thousands of years, human beings have found themselves caught in the prison of their own story lines aided and abetted by the influence of prejudices of family systems, cultures, and religious programming. For the most part, humans have felt at the mercy of events and influences beyond their control and have often suffered greatly as a result. The reason for this has been the limits of their own beliefs, their amnesia about who they actually are, and the hypnosis delivered by the civilizations within which they live.
Human beings are evolved and concentrated points of higher awareness scattered throughout the physical plane. We shine like bright lights in an otherwise glowing landscape, growing more radiant and extending our light to all in our proximity. In this way we human beings are growing in awareness and helping the rest of the physical plane to grow brighter as well even if we don’t know it. The higher-self abides in our awareness of our own consciousness but we are often distracted from this higher self by focusing on thoughts, feelings, and perceptions seeking to define, explain and interpret our surroundings. In other words, we humans are so curious and fascinated by the goings on in the physical world that we forget who we are for long stretches of time. We begin to identify with our physical bodies and our very local personalities – projecting importance to everything that seems outside of ourselves and forgetting who and what we actually are. In a word, we humans choose to become small and compressed when we are actually spacious and transcendent.
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