Jan. 2, 2007

For those of you who are participating in our yearly cycle of the Rituals of Manifestation Deck, we started anew with Alchemy on Saturday, December 30th, 2006. This is our 3rd year in a cycle of 4 years of doing the Deck one Card per week, 52 weeks in the year. We invite you to continue on with us and the community of others who are participating in the same way around the world with the Deck in this fashion.

If you find this way of experiencing the Deck a bit too intense, we welcome you to utilize the Deck in a cycle of one card a day, 52 days in a row and then repeating that cycle until you feel more aligned with the one Card a week practice. If you choose to do the Deck one Card a day instead of one Card a week with the rest of us, we still invite you to participate in the one Card a week cycle. You may simply want to focus less on that practice and more on your concurrent one Card a day practice. Even just a simple Ritual of connecting with the Cards as others are in the weekly cycle can potentially supply you with a support system and a family far greater than yourself, even if your main focus is on doing the Deck one Card a day. If you do choose to do the Deck in this concurrent manner, be clear about your process and keep it simple so that it is about regeneration and clarity and does not engender confusion. Again, if you are doing the Deck in the one Card a day cycle for 52 days, we recommend starting over at the beginning again if you “miss” or “forget” to do your practice one day. After all, some of the most powerful tools you can embody in this practice are focus, commitment and responsibility. (We assume that if you are doing the Deck one Card a week for the full year, that you are committed and responsible for maintaining that practice over the full year.)

We are finally getting around to writing the Rituals of Manifestation Workbook. It will go over in depth these various cycles and alignments and link them all together in the myriad web of life. We have been practicing the Deck all these years in these many cycles as our own way to gain greater insights and open hearts about these processes and we continue to use this tool to consciously evolve and to ground our divinity ever more in and through our physical bodies and actions. When the Workbook will appear in print is anybody’s guess, but we look forward to it manifesting within the next year.

So as it is a New Year and a new cycle of the Rituals of Manifestation Deck, we offer you these words below to welcome in all that is new and to give thanks for life upon this glorious EarthStar.

Do you know what happens when you become a Healed Shield? You are here as a vessel of Great Spirit and Great Spirit lays out its hands and creates. It creates others who will be creators. Surely you have heard of Grandmother Spider spinning her web all around the world and making the connections between all beings.

Healing your Shield means that you have been a cracked Shield and have experienced the ways of death and then you come around the circle of your own freedom to choose the ways of life. Now let me be very clear about this. Many 2-leggeds will experience the ways of life and death but do you know what they will not experience most of the time in that? They will not experience death as a conscious choice that they leaned into, that they dived into, so that they could know the release of everything fully. Yes, they will experience the gift of life but most of the time will they feel it consciously? Will they feel it pass through all of their cells, one by one lighting them up and affirming that they are a sacred vessel of life?

To heal your Shield does not mean that you are perfect. It does not mean that you are done. It does not mean that there is not more to heal. We are blessed by the Great Spirit who is a creator, ever endlessly creating. To heal your Shield means that you choose to consciously experience every level of creation including life and death and more.

A Healed Shield is a being who has been through the most difficult journeys that their body and soul could endure, and then, they used that as sacred fuel to accept it all and to consciously experience more of everything that Spirit offers. A Healed Shield is intimate with all things because a Healed Shield chooses to be utterly intimate with Great Spirit and all its ways, wonders and creations.

When you know what I have said, then you will not hesitate to walk into the world as a Healed Shield for it is simply your fullest choice; it is your intent in the Center Stillness and the motion of the exponential waves of life and death.

In this cycle of “Alchemy,” you can realize that as you realize yourself, as you realize your healed Shield you know that you hold a vessel that shapes the patterns and the flows of eternal lifeforce according to the intent of Great Spirit. In this first ritual of the cycle of Rituals, we are being invited to consciously welcome the birth of a new year, a new cycle and a new life. It will not look like your expectations. It will not match your perfections – it will surpass them. It will answer your needs and it will release your desires.

Consciously welcome this birth. Make your body a ready home for lifeforce. Freely choose to clear away distraction, confusion and the subtle defenses of the old ways. Welcome these teacher friends. Distraction and separation are part of the welcoming party of this new cycle. Clearing them away does not mean sending them away or burying them. That is not the way of a conscious being. That kind of death is unconscious and it will siphon away lifeforce instead of multiplying it.

To clear your fear and separation means to be utterly conscious of them, to be clear with each other, to recognize them, to know that it is there, to fully, freely see the reflection of all parts of your self within them. You go to the welcoming party of life and Alchemy, with all parts of yourself. If you cannot welcome all that you are graciously, then how can you welcome life who bestows all the gifts upon you including death and separation.

Today our ritual is to make way for the new Alchemy and the New Year. Welcome it with our heart and body and soul. You are creator vessels, children, of Creator Spirits. Make your bodies ready to hold the space for more life as respectfully as possible. That means give all of your creations as beautiful a road to walk as you can.