re-set Archives - Owl Medicine: Shamanic Healing

Reprogramming

I’m just having a thought – and I want to flesh it out, but I’m not going to have enough time to do it this evening. It’s a sort of weird sense that maybe we’re undergoing a reprogramming.

Ha ha – just rereading that first sentence I have to laugh at myself. “Lisa! You’re having a thought! Good on you, girl! Let’s celebrate!”

Seriously, though. I was just having a brief online conversation with a friend and fellow mesa-carrier. As you may recall, my mesa is my sacred medicine bundle, called a mesa (or misa) in the Q’ero tradition. Anyway, we were talking about the recent suggestion we’d both heard from a respected Paqo (the Q’ero word for shaman or medicine person) that we need to ‘reprogram’ our mesas.

Cosmic Unplug

While I want to contemplate this more extensively for myself, it dawned on me that perhaps at least part of what we’re all experiencing with this pandemic is the equivalent of Spirit unplugging all of us in a huge effort to get us all to re-set ourselves back to a baseline from which we can rebuild a new way of being in the world.

Admit it: how many of us have often freaked the heck out when our computers or cell phones went on the fritz and we couldn’t get them to respond appropriately no matter what we did? In the old days, especially, when these amazing electronic marvels would suddenly stop doing what we were just getting used to them doing, we’d want to melt down ourselves.

“Oh my God, it’s going to cost me an arm and a leg to get this repaired.”

Or “Oh good grief. What if I never get this thing running again? What will I do?”

Miracle Cure

And then our IT person (be it someone literally from the IT department where we work, or – more likely in my case, at least – one of my sons), would ask, “Did you shut it down and restart it?”

We all know, nine times out of ten, that was the Miracle Cure we were looking for.

Well, I’m wondering if the societal ramifications of the coronavirus are forcing us into an involuntary shutdown. Actually, the answer is an obvious yes in a literal sense. Our economies across the world, but especially here, have been forced into a shutdown in order to prevent the spread of the virus.

But I’m wondering if we might benefit from sitting with this concept and playing with it a bit more. How might we choose to ‘restart’ our lives, or what might we want to have our lives look like when we ‘restart’ if this shut down was meant to force us into rearranging the way we think about ourselves. Rethink how we want to BE in the world.

If we were able to reboot ourselves, how would our newly re-ordered internal perceptions line up?

(T-551)

I Got Nothin’

I’ve shown up every night for 59 days, trusting I would have something to write about. But tonight? I got nothing’. I know I said at the very beginning of this 1111 Devotion journey that there might be days when I would write one sentence and that would have to suffice.

But I hoped it wouldn’t actually come to that.

And I guess it hasn’t literally come to that today, either, since I’ve obviously written more than one sentence. (Umm, yea for me?)

Get Out Of Jail Free Card

So I’m in the clear. I’ve saved myself from using my Get Out Of Jail Free card tonight.

Which makes me wonder: How many GOOJF cards do I get in the 1111 Devotion? Since I’m making up the rules as I go along, I’d say 111 seems fair. Ten percent. What do you think?

In the grand scheme of things, that might appear reasonable (10%). But wow. Looking at it from the perspective that 10% would give me 111 whole, actual, days of only writing one sentence seems crazily over the top. That’s just shy of four months if I strung them all together.

Funny how perspective can shift everything, isn’t it?

That’s the cool thing about shamanic work, actually. (Bet you didn’t see that correlation coming out of left field, did you?)

Perception and Perspective

But it’s true. So much of what we experience in our day-to-day lives and in our world in general is rooted in our perceptions. And as we learn and grow more adept at shifting our perception, we actually gain the ability to begin shifting our reality in ways we might never have imagined.

And part of how we perceive anything is the perspective from which we look at it. But obviously, before we can shift our perspective, we have to realize what our present one is. How are we looking at something? Is it from a place of fear? Of feeling magnanimous and abundant? Is it from a place of feeling centered and at peace?

There are those varying perspectives we can consider, and then there are different levels of perception we can employ to shift our reality. But again, we first have to train ourselves to become aware of the different levels so we can identify what one we are looking at or perceiving from at any given moment.

So here I am, starting a conversation on how important both perspective and differing levels of perception can completely influence our experience of ‘reality.’ And I’m also suggesting that shamanic work can result in dramatic shifts in not only our perceptions, and perspectives, but also our realities.

That’s some pretty heady stuff to be contemplating right around midnight. Or the crack of dawn, if that’s when you’re reading this.

Checking Our Perspective – Occasionally

Just think about it. If you were told you had only one more month to live, would you look at anything the same way as you are in this present moment? That’s a radical question to ask any of us to contemplate, even if it might be some people’s actual reality. And we might be inclined to judge it as just a dumb intellectual exercise, since it can feel like we are bullshitting ourselves if we really try to imagine looking at ourselves from the perspective of knowing we only have one more month (or week, or day) to live.

But I do think it is helpful, sometimes, to take a personal re-set. To really sit down and think about how we are choosing to perceive our life, our circumstances, our relationships, and even our world, at any given time. Are we looking at these things from the default perspective that ‘things will never change?’ That, it seems to me, is an even greater bullshitting of ourselves than the former.

Ha ha – maybe I should’ve stopped at that one sentence and let things be.

Naaah. I still have 111 in my back pocket. Or do I?

(T-1052)