Know this. The actions of the molecules in your body are influenced by the status of your energetic biofield.
If you’ve read the first three parts of this series, and more importantly, if you have begun working with Medicine Wheel ceremonies, you can understand their simple yet timeless quality. They have been used by many generations of indigenous Americans for thousands of years over wide geographic areas.
They have great power to bring healing and spiritual growth to the individual as well as communities at large. When something works, it persists. If you have not yet done so, we advise you now to read these articles about the first three directions on our or Health & Happiness’s website before reading this last one of the series.
The realm of Spirit is associated with the East direction. For most indigenous people of North America, Eagle is recognized as the archetype of the East. The Lakota Sioux word for the East is Iwiyohiyanpata and is associated with morning, spring, and childhood. The Lakota color of the East is yellow like our sun rising into the sky each day. The language of the East is energy resonance.
When we connect with Eagle, we experience the place of becoming, and reality reveals its underlying true energetic essence that is 99% consciousness, and only 1% matter. With their large powerful wings, eagles soar high above the mountains, rivers, forests and lakes, yet with their keen vision can spot fish in the water 2,000 feet below.
The ability of Eagle to see the big picture and the small details simultaneously urges us to rise above the mundane battles occupying our lives, and gain the view from the heavens close to the Great Spirit. When facing any difficulty, the closer we can get to the energy of Spirit, the less energy we need to effect change, and the universe seems to conspire in our behalf.
The four teachings of the East provide a portal to the way of the sage “who transcends to become resonant with Spirit, bringing wisdom, healing, and beauty into our world.”
The four teachings of the East are: Mastering Time, Owning Your Projections, No Mind, and Indigenous Alchemy. Understand what the sages and the scientists know—that beyond cause and effect, coincidence and synchronicity are also qualities of time that operate in a circular and simultaneous fashion from future to present to past and also all at once. This is what quantum physicists call temporal entanglement.
Develop a regular meditation practice to silence your mind, and become familiar with your luminous energy field and its projections. Resonate with Spirit, and see infinite possibilities to bring beauty, balance, and grace into yourself and all our relations. Embark on a sacred journey.
Spirit is a fundamental property of the universe. It is an expansive, infinite, creative, matrix of resonating energy, a consciousness that keeps the cosmos evolving and renewing itself. You can trust in Spirit’s power and wisdom. This is brought into focus by creating your Medicine Wheel and gaining awareness of your energy body within a sacred space.
Open sacred space and create a Medicine Wheel honoring the East and the Eagle archetype, preferably with an eastward vista.
As you create your Medicine Wheel, ask, “Who is making this?” Then ask, “Who is asking this?” Stand on the East side of your Medicine Wheel. Begin the 4/7/8 breath (4-count inhale, 7-count hold, 8-count exhale) for seven cycles, extend your arms, and look at your hands. Now close your eyes, and feel your hands as vibrating energy. Next, with eyes closed, rub your hands together briefly, extend them apart, and slowly bring them together. Note any subtle tingling or vibrational sensation changes as you bring your hands toward each other. Do you feel any repelling or resisting force as they come near each other? Try to sense this same sensation in your shoulders & chest.
Repeat this exercise often to become more aware of your underlying energetic nature. Experiment with something that triggers anger or fear as well as gratitude or love, and feel the different effects on your energy body.
Focus only on the roles or beliefs about yourself and the teachings that you moved from the North into the East quadrant of your Medicine Wheel last time. Have you been successful in relinquishing into the fire the roles that are no longer valid? Have you become those teachings as you walk on the Earth?
If so, find a role stick(s) to hold with the object(s) representing the teaching in your hands, along with your essence stone. Powerfully blow these new energetic patterns into the stone. Place the stone into the center of the Medicine Wheel. If no transcendence is experienced yet, also blow that into the stone. Leave, and return the next day.
Meditation is absolutely essential for work in the East, and is greatly facilitated by opening of the eighth chakra, and heart presence breathing.
Meditation has been found to disrupt the default mode network (DMN) in the brain that creates repetitive thoughts focused on the self or ego. The DMN wastes energy and leads to depressive and anxious states.
The eighth chakra is a glowing sun-like sphere just outside the body above our crown, and is known by ancient medicine women and men as the place where the divine resides within us–our soul. To expand it to form a sacred, healing bubble surrounding you for your personal work, thrust both arms together up over your head, expand this sphere with your hands, and use your arms to slowly pull this energy down over your entire body to your feet. Then slowly return your hands to the mid-chest over your heart.
Feel how this feels and then begin the 4/7/8 heart breath. Stand on the East side of your Medicine Wheel facing east. Close your eyes and inhale with the in-breath feeling to come through the front of your chest wall over your heart. Let the breath expand briefly as a light within your heart as you remember anything of beauty you’ve experienced in your life. Exhale out through the front of your chest over the heart. Repeat several cycles, then stop the counting, and retain only the pattern of breathing for several minutes. Heart breathing has been shown to create strong resonant coherence within your energy body. Also, in our experience, resonance with Spirit is felt through the heart more than the mind.
Now repeat the exercise from yesterday for experiencing the energy body. Retrieve your essence stone from the center of the Medicine Wheel and hold it next to your heart. Call to the Eagle archetype to come and wrap her wings around you, and allow you to experience the world of Spirit. Journey safely with Eagle, and let go. Feel yourself dissolving into the energetic field state, into the place of becoming. This is the world of an infinite, conscious, energetic matrix of wisdom where everything everywhere is intertwined. It is timeless. Resonate with this immensity for a few moments, and then return to your Medicine Wheel with Eagle. Allow this experience to move down into your body. Embody it. This is indigenous alchemy.
Your essence stone now has become a medicine stone storing your new energetic resonance pattern.
It is a power object you can hold and consult at any time to help preserve what you have accomplished, and store future changes and personal course corrections as you complete future cycles around the Medicine Wheel.
Destroy your East Medicine Wheel, close sacred space, leave, and walk upon the Earth in beauty until your next Medicine Wheel ceremony honoring the South direction.
Jude Catallo and Scott Emerson, MD of timelesshealing.org are both graduates of The Four Winds Society: Shamanic Energy Medicine Intensive Apprenticeship 2017 – ongoing; members of the Oklaweva Native American Church 2016 – ongoing; & Andean Cosmic Vision Apprenticeship, Don Theo Paredes 2003 – ongoing.
Excerpted with permission from the Spring 2020 issue of Health & Happiness U.P. Magazine. Copyright 2020, Empowering Lightworks, LLC.
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