I use a simple system for coming into relationship with the dreams, easy ways of working with them that fit many different needs and impulses. I hope, ultimately, that my students will come to experience their dreams as numinous realities or messages from the invisible world, as guides for living and preparation for dying.

In surrender to her, we leave the problem in her hands; in allowing ourselves to be used in the healing of the planet, we become part of her solution.

In most religious thinking the body is equated with the earth and women.

Reclaiming the right to birth in our own instinctual way is a shamanic act of courage that has unfortunately become as remote to us as our ability to fly through the night in the form of an owl or heal the sick with the power of the drum. It wouldn’t hurt if we began to think of our birthing and child rearing as central parts of our shamanic

A larger intelligence is at work, which includes the intellect as well as feelings, sensations, dreams, desires, images, hopes, and impressions. In this process a woman can begin to follow the principles of synchronicity laid out in the last chapter.

That something is synchronicity as an active way of life, a path of steady observation and response to the little messages that come from the environment every day:

that were so natural and such a normal part of life, perhaps it would be discovered that you had some particular gifts in relation to it all, and you would be recognized as a young girl and then given the benefit of the teachings and the practices that would develop your gifts into useful skills for the healing and well-being of your community.

Walking the shaman’s path is like having an ongoing dialogue with Nature or with the invisible world or with the Goddess, in which you are asking a question, receiving information, processing that information, and asking the next question. These questions and answers are like steps on the path of shamanic healing. In other times and other cultures,

As esoteric teacher Alice Bailey points out, what we call thinking is nothing but regurgitated programming in our brain-consciousness.