Giving Away Everything I Own
On this day, I invited all of my friends, including the people from the WES group that is building a Goddess temple, to my storage unit to take away whatever they wanted. The goal was to empty the unit. About 15 people showed up to participate in the giveaway. The 10 X 10 unit took about 2.5 hours to empty and when I was done, I left with about 6 boxes of stuff, mostly financial records, memorabilia, and altar stuff. Anything that no one wanted, got donated to the local shelter or thrown away. All the Disney videos went to the local women’s shelter.
I had arranged to do this give away shortly before I picked up a book called John (Fire) Lame Deer Seeker of Visions. In this book, the author tells the story of a Lakota medicine man and of the history of the Native American people told through his eyes. It is a fascinating story and it gives a lot of insight into the people of native cultures in this land. The thing that struck me personally was that I read (after making the plans for the giveaway) that in Lakota culture, the ritual of giving away everything you own is a celebration of a rite of passage, it is also a rite performed by people who are to become the medicine men for their tribes. The synchronicity of it hit me hard.
I’m used to doing things intuitively that people later explain to me as being appropriate to custom and tradition, but usually it’s more witchy in nature. This is the first time I’ve had the shamanic connection that I am aware of. There were several other things in this book which struck me the same way at the time, but I don’t remember what they are now. The giveaway was the most significant, obviously.
[For the record – even though it doesn’t sound like it in this post, this was a serious “oh shit” moment for me. My stomach dropped and I tried hard not to panic. I didn’t know anything about shamanism – or so I thought – and here I was pretty sure that I was being initiated into it. As it turned out, I knew a lot more about shamanism than I thought. I had been studying with two different shamans already – my Reiki Master Teacher, Kathie Valentine who had studied with the Incan shamans in Peru and my closest friend, Ken Peterson, who is the most powerful shaman teacher I know to this day. ]
See the next step of the journey
* This is part of an ongoing series of posts detailing what happened on a spiritual pilgrimage that I took in 2002. To start from the beginning, go to July 2, 2013. To see the entire journey as it gets published, click on the category “You Want Me To Do WHAT?!!?” to see all of the posts.
