I have a radically expanded view of the meaning and purpose of healing and creativity which speaks to something I call Creative Healership for Peace. Healership is deeply spiritual and transformational work. Healing of the kind I have sought out for myself and which I practice on behalf of others and the world, is deeply, personally transformational. It brings us up against wounds that are both individual, ancestral and collective—reaching into this life and others. It is al

Have you done a lot of therapy and personal growth work—perhaps years or even decades—and one day, you realize that what you thought was healed or resolved is still active in some way? Or some aspect of it resurfaces? Maybe because some outer event seems to reactivate it? I have heard this lament from friends, clients and students over many years: “I thought I had resolved this! Why do I have to do it again? I’m so tired of this!” I have been in the same boat myself. Starin

Current events in 2017 bring me back to the day after 9/11 when I sat in a packed concert hall at the University of Virginia. The administration had set up an open mike event where all members of the campus to share their thoughts and feelings about what had happened. I, like many others, stepped onto stage to speak about my grief and to call for everyone to seek healing not only of the wounds incurred by the previous day’s events, but of their own personal wounds from betr

I live in Charlottesville, VA. On Saturday, August 12, the date of the white supremacist rally here, I was in South Dakota visiting my stepsister and supporting the sacred Lakota Sundance ceremonies. On that afternoon, a friend in Chicago texted me and asked if I was aware of events unfolding violence in my hometown. I looked at the newspaper on my Android. What I saw shocked me. I was filled with grief, anger, and confusion. As so many of us were and still are. Neverthel

In this third blog of the series on Shamanic Energy Medicine for Treating Trauma and Other Contemporary Afflictions, I go more deeply...

I have a mission to make contemporary western shamanic energy medicine relevant and understandable to practitioners in mainstream...

One day, I was cleaning my house and listening to a radio program on the problem of post-partum depression in women. The researcher being interviewed had done a study of a large group of women who had experienced depression and more mental and emotional imbalances following the birth of their child. These were women who otherwise had been happy to become mothers, loved their babies, and prior to their pregnancy and birth, had never had any serious problems of a psychological

In my blog entitled “Dreaming Violence into Peace, Part 1″, I shared that I had recently had a series of violent dreams which seemed to...