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Giving Gratitude for the Hard Stuff

We are not actually entitled to anything, not the water we drink or the air we breathe. Everything is a gift. For the gifts to flow we must give thanks. Gratitude is not only something that we needed to feel; it must take form. Gratitude must be part of the labor, love and wisdom of your day. It is not enough to say, "thank you"; gratitude must be made concrete through action and intent. How then do we show true gratitude for the gifts that come to us through the door of pain, betrayal, heartbreak, and less than perfect parents. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we give sincere thanks for the hard stuff in life. Gratitude as spiritual bypass sounds suspiciously like "everything is as it should be" and "they did the best they could" and it is still a bypass. How do we give thanks for those people, experiences, and events that show us what we do not want to see within ourselves?

Tuesday, November 25, 2014 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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What is PTSD?

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is an issue of the soul, not the mind. To define PTSD as a psychiatric disorder is to miss the simplicity of what it is and how we can alleviate the suffering now for those who are trapped in a post-traumatic stress response to everyday. When we understand the soul loss involved in PTSD and include shamanic healing in the modalities prescribed, we can bring healing to those who have been damaged by their experience in terrifying ordeals, situations in which their life was threatened, or sustained situations that involve the constant threat of physical harm. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores what PTSD is, why it isn’t just getting triggered by unresolved issues of the past, and why we as a culture must begin to encourage suffers of PTSD to step beyond the boundaries of psychiatry to heal for themselves and for the next generations.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Sturgeon's Law of Spiritual Practice

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

A friend asked me recently if the whole new age arena was just a lot of escapism for wounded people and ultimately another trap. It's become a recurring theme. A lot of what I'm hearing lately from people is frustration, fatigue, and even disgust with all things "spiritual." Many are feeling disillusioned and even betrayed. Some of them have actually been betrayed by spiritual practitioners, so that's quite understandable.

What I said to my friend, though, is that I feel I have learned and grown a lot through my experiences and study in things that fall under the very large umbrella of "new age." I have had some excellent teachers, but Sturgeon's Law applies.

Sturgeon's revelation, commonly referred to as Sturgeon's law, is an adage commonly cited as "ninety percent of everything is crap." It is derived from quotations by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic: while Sturgeon coined another adage that he termed "Sturgeon's law", it is his "revelation" that is usually referred to by that term.

The phrase was derived from Sturgeon's observation that while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, it could be noted that the majority of examples of works in other fields could equally be seen to be of low quality and that science fiction was thus no different in that regard from other art forms.

Given my own fairly extensive experience in what I shall broadly call new agedom, I feel very comfortable calling roughly ninety percent of it crap. Much of that crap, I ignore. I know my assessment is subjective and that one man's trash is another man's treasure. In other cases, where I think it's destructive, or even dangerous, I am not able to ignore it in good conscience. In particular, I have criticized The Secret and related law of attraction material. I have also included new age teachers such as James Arthur Ray and Teal Bosworth Scott Swan in discussions of religious abuse.

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Creating a Crucible of Transformation

Humans have an amazing capacity for change if they choose to access it. Even transformation, which is change we cannot go back from, is accessible when we risk engaging our hearts in the process of changes and allow inspiration to take over our minds. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week as she explores the elements required to create a crucible of transformation in our hearts and why our vulnerability as our great super power. Straight up, humans hate change... and they really hate transformation. But shamanism, with its robust relationship with the Trickster, offers us skills to be clever in the face of fear, to risk the Unknown when faced with the certainty of repeating patterns, and to be vulnerable so that we can engage the wisdom of our courageous hearts.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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The Cardinal's Demotion

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

It's official. Cardinal Burke is being demoted from a high court justice to a figurehead role. As discussed here, Burke himself had confirmed the rumored change. It is assumed that this is due to open criticism of the pope's more tolerant stance on social issues... and for being a firebrand.

Burke, who made waves in 2004 for saying that voting for a pro-choice candidate is “a serious sin,” has been an unusually outspoken detractor of Pope Francis since he ascended to the papacy in 2013. When the pontiff declared last year that the Catholic church was too “obsessed” with culture war issues such as abortion, for instance, Burke responded by saying that the church “can never talk enough” about the “massacre of the unborn.” And while Francis answered a question about gay priests by saying “who am I to judge?” last July, Burke told LifeSiteNews in October that homosexual acts are “always and everywhere wrong, evil.”

But on Saturday, the Vatican announced that Burke, who was elevated to Cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI, has been removed from his influential position as head of the Apostolic Signatura — the Vatican’s highest court — and reassigned to a largely ceremonial role as the Patron of the Order of the Knights of Malta.

“The position of Patron of the the Order of Malta is usually given to a retired cardinal, or as a second task to an active cardinal,” Michael Sean Winters, a prominent Catholic journalist, wrote in the National Catholic Reporter. “It has almost no responsibilities. The demotion is unprecedented, and completely warranted: Cardinal Burke’s influence at the Vatican has been crushingly backward looking, and that influence has resulted in some unhappy appointments.”

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The Heart of Fear

Everything has a heart, even fear. In our chronic, cultural avoidance of fear we miss the heart of the matter and in that miss the way through the fear and into a new way of living. Instead we delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped only to find ourselves cycling through our litany of fear-based stories, day after day, relationship after relationship. "With the intelligence that comes through us in shamanic journeying," explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, "We can get past the anxiety and panic and touch the heart of the matter. Once at the heart of things all manner of interesting
possibilities unfold." Join us this week as we explore the elemental nature of fear and path rarely taken through the heart of it.

Tuesday, November 4, 2014 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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