Mindful Health Alternatives - Episode 31: Spirit Hollow

Video Transcript:

[Music] welcome to mindful health alternative my name is Darlene young I'm outreach coordinator here at cat TV and I'm from Arlington Vermont and I'm also the host of mindful health alternatives this show appears here at cat TV on channel 15 each month and the goal of the series is to introduce you our public that watch us on television or on the computer to a less stressful lifestyle through several

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Different methods our guest today is Tracy Forrest of Spirit Hollow which is located in Ches Barre Vermont I'd like to welcome you Tracy thank you for being with us I'm really excited to have you here and today we're going to talk about Spirit Hollow what their mission is what they have to offer Tracy brought some different things with her today she brought some sage she's going to talk to you a little bit about sage and what it's used for sure she also brought a

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Rattle and she'll talk a little bit about that she brought some drums there's a workshop coming up in June on workshops and we're going to talk about what they're going to do with the workshops they will be offered again probably not in 2017 but you know Tracy is only a phone call or an email away and she can tell you more about what's going on yeah thank you you're welcome so Tracy without further ado why don't you tell us a little bit about Spirit

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Hollow what its mission is how you became involved with it yes and what happens if Spirit Hollow thank you you're welcome so we are located on in Shaftesbury Hollow at the very end of the road the last mailbox the last telephone pole and I have a hundred acres in the middle of a 5,000 acre wilderness area Wow so it's truly an immersion in nature when you come to Spirit Hollow and the way that I found it was with my former husband we

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Were looking for some land and we lost our keys walking on a another piece of land and my ex-husband said he's never lost his keys before since and we had to knock on the door of a neighbor and ask for a ride home and they said that last piece of land might be for sale probably they sold to the National Forest but we got the guys name we called him up and my ex-husband said is there do you have land for sale and he said yes and he said who's a realtor and

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He said no realtor so there was no sign no realtor it was just for sale and we ended up being able to get it for a very reasonable price and it felt like we were kind of being reeled in by the land itself and part of the work that we do at Spirit Hollow is to try to connect people with nature again because as we know we are a culture that is very disconnected from the natural world the way that we live our lives the way that we get our food the way that we treat

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Animals the way that we all of it is a lot of disconnect from living naturally and so we really felt like there was an energy or a spiritual aspect to the place that kind of beckoned us and met the energy that we were putting out there and so that was in 1999 really oh my okay so when we did the caveat about this land is that it had 40 tons of garbage on it well when we went out and saw it we were amazed at how beautiful it was it has two streams it's just

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Backed by all this national forest land in a lot of hardwoods and just very beautifully situated but had just never been never got of a dump in like 50 years so everybody imagines it is the depository it had been like a family camp you know like a you know go out and hang out in the summer kind of thing and then there was one of the remaining funds was the one living there and he just wasn't taking care of anything so we had the three volunteer fire

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Apartments come out and do training exercises then burn down all the structures that were because he did have a kind of house if you could call it that and there was some collapsed barns and so we had them come and do it just a giant fire oh we caught it our housewarming party haha that was it ranged and talk about using sage to smudge it was like a smudge for the area so then we spent an entire summer so it was about this time of year that we

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Found that we got that they got the land in 1999 so we spent a whole summer cleaning up so we're talking about like pieces of cars and half-hour like if you had never gone to the dump in 50 years that he would find ya okay and so it was it was a big effort that we spent like eight hour days for three months cleaning it up but we knew what we had in terms of how it was perfect for the kind of work that we want to do drumming singing being in nature making some

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Noise so that we don't have any neighbors that would be affected by that okay so we we built a yurt from Pacific yurts originally and lived in that year for a year while we build our home which is a geodesic dome okay so the circle structures have always kind of called to us and me and so we created spirit hollow together and then had children together and then six years ago we decided to part ways and so my ex-husband is now in Brattleboro and I

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Remain at spirit Hollow with with my two children and my various animals and I and I also teach at two local colleges and I teach yoga as well Wow I need to my income together just like most of us in Vermont or many of us in Vermont yeah yes so that's kind of the back story but my ex-husband Emery who is now known as Ananda and I met doing shamanic work and he lived up here and I lived in Kentucky so I moved up here to be with him then in the next year we found the land and

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So like I said I've been there since since 1999 now and we run shamanic training programs which I can talk about a little bit later which is an overview I run a romantic training programs from fall through the spring for adults in the summers and we're gearing up for that now I run transformational camps for kids and for teens and then offer weekend immersions and longer week-long immersions depending on the year and

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What's going on in the calendar okay so can we back up just a second many of our viewers might not know what a yurt is huh can you just sort of like I can describe it on you know and if you go to the spirit Hollow website you can see some pictures so a year is comes from Mongolia originally it's kind of like a Mongolian teepee in a sense and they were very portable for the nomadic peoples and there are circular structure that has beams that all come up to a

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Center ring and there's a skylight and so again it's a circle which of course is a sacred sacred geometry and so we wanted to have a space like that for our workshops and and they're very beautiful they're like if you were in a traditional native yurt it would be covered with yak skins and it wouldn't have windows and these kind of modern contemporary yurts made in several places now but the company we got it from was out in Oregon they are kit you

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Can put them up basically in a couple of days you just have to have a platform for it and then you can raise the whole thing in a day really but it has a skylight we have a wood stove in it if it was a traditional yurt the the center would be a smoke hole for the smoke to go out of so we have that as our meeting space and workshop space good yes that's very good now um when you were growing up did you like came with nature I mean yeah how did you follow this path you

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Said you were in Kentucky correct I grew up in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania okay and then I went to school of college and graduate school in Ohio and then I ended up getting a teaching job in Kentucky where I was until I met my husband in my late 20s so so that was kind of the background but I did spend a lot of my time as a child even though I grew up in the suburbs in the woods in the behind my parents house was just a pretty beautiful patch of woods and as I traced

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Back through my my kind of journey in life there are certain things that I think always called to me about what my soul wanted to do and I think we all have that in us that kind of knowing from the time we're little and of course we don't always keep it alive because the culture wants us to become consumers instead of become seekers or become travelers they want us to be tourists right so I used to spend a lot of time in the woods and a lot of

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Time singing and a lot of time in a kind of imaginary around connecting with the trees and following the deer trails and always from the time I was very small I imagined myself living it was a cabin man but in a cabin at the end of the road with no neighbors in kind of a little bit of a fairy tale land and that's actually what I've created for my life by finding and growing and building spirit Hollow this is cool really really good I had no idea that it was such a

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Large hunter we would say acreage you know right right so even though it was really trashed we were like but look at how beautifully situated this is for you know if you're really an part of my mission in life and spirit hollows is to like I said to bridge that gap between the human ones and the natural world and to have a place that's that immersed is it really has its own magic and people who come there have their own relationship with the land or with a

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Certain tree or a certain sitting spot or a certain place they walk and I love that that I am the steward of this place but that the place has its own magic its own agenda its own kind of consciousness that that that calls to certain people and when you drive out there you can begin to feel it as you get closer really well you know that's what I think a lot of people comment on that but when you do sacred work in a space in a spot for over and over and over time over

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Time and it builds and we're talking eighteen years now it starts to have a ripple effect it starts to shift the energy and so while the energy was very kind of clogged and sick when we found the place it's cleared and cleared and opened and open so that and I also believe that I hold that space but the people who come are bringing their energy to bringing their love to bringing their tears are bringing their you know their desires to

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Heal the world and that's a big part of what we're trying to do there yeah yeah it's phenomenal it really is in each person as you said brings their own gifts out of the area and they also take away something different than what I might take away yeah you might take away in a differently that's good right so why don't you tell us about some of the programs that you offer if you would in just a second you want to talk about the sage or the rattle to what it's kind of

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All connected to the core of our mission okay so we say our logo or a slogan I guess it would be is is transforming consciousness one extraordinary being at a time it seems to me and and one of the quotes that we have in our opening scrolling photos on our web page is from Krishnamurti who is an Indian philosopher and it and it says what you are the world is what you are the world is and without your transformation there can be no transformation of the world

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And as we can see we are at a tipping point on this planet in terms of all the upheaval we're seeing politically the people were seeing around the environment the fact that we've pushed population to its limit nor really are at a crucial time on this planet and I sometimes as a human can get overwhelmed and want to help in a big big way and what can I do and I've been politically active and I've been environmentally active but I think that the greatest

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Healing comes one-on-one or in small groups where people can really if people are going to get healed become more whole and transform what they believe that does ripple out and so our mission is to help people to transform their consciousness whether those are adults coming for a shamanic training which is an ongoing thing that goes for up to three years or if if kids come for a camp or if it's women coming to one of our weekend retreats those are

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All opportunities to step out of our grind or daily whatever which is sometimes very comfortable it's not like it's a bad thing but you step out of our comfort zone and immerse ourselves in nature with like-minded individuals in a safe container can really transform the way you look at where you where you make decisions how you live your life where you spend your money and all of those things trickle down into how we can start to change this this crazy world

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Yeah and I mean and it changes each individual as well I mean it by communing with nature and coming to like Spirit Hollow people can work on their stress levels - exactly and you know sort of downgrade if you will from that hustle and bustle and you know got to do this got to be here yeah I laugh because it's very difficult because I know several years ago I was living out of three different schedule books you know I've got it here I've got to be there

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I've got to do this I've got to do that and that was probably about 20 years ago and I mean it was really stressful and you know ended up having cancer surgery and you know so now I've taken away the three schedule books and basically have one but I don't always pay attention to what's scheduled because um trying to lead a less stressful lifestyle you just have to let go of that schedule book true yeah there's a lot of pressure on us in this culture a lot of pressure so

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Let's talk okay well so the core of what we do is based in deep ecology or understanding that that human beings are not necessarily the top of the be-all and end-all in terms of consciousness and evolution that that nature itself sentient and has incredible gifts for us and we can tap into those gifts through some of the techniques that would teach at spirit Hollow and so the core of what we teach is in shamanism which I can describe for a moment which has to do

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With some of these tools okay so shamanism is and I work with core shamanism which looks at the things that are in common Universal or near Universal all across the planet in shamanic cultures it's not culture specific like a Peruvian shamanism or Native American shamanism but it's cross-cultural meaning that we're looking at what techniques are in common regardless of if you are in the rain forest or in Siberia or in North America

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Or in Australia and it's amazing because these techniques go back 40,000 years into the Upper Paleolithic period and we know this through archaeological you know remain brand and findings and what we see is that when you get away all the bells and whistles of different cultures the costuming or or particular kinds of ceremony or ritual what you see is that underneath that there are these core techniques and that even though these people anciently had no actual contact

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With each other they were still doing these same amazing things they had the same worldview in terms of the cosmology of the universe they had the same understanding of having tutelary or helping spirits power animals teachers that were outside of time they also used some kind of monotonous percussion to alter the consciousness some cultures did use psychotropic plants but what 90% of the world shamans use monotonous percussion

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And that's just a drum that's beat at a very very monotonous beat it's not musically that interesting but and this is the method that we use it's safe if there's something you have to adjust and it cultures your brainwave and in that altered state we can take a journey and that is where we go and we get help and healing information for our people or teach others to use these techniques to get their own personal connection to helpers and to questions

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Getting answers to questions and so what we can see now that we have advanced medical technology is that if we hook somebody up to an EEG ring and we read their brain and we let them listen to it shamanic drum beat will find that very quickly the brain will go from a beta state into an alpha state really like within a few minutes yes if you listen to that drum for longer you'll get you into those deeper states the data and the throat the Delta and the theta

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States quicker than if you set for meditation for a long long time so it's a quick method to alter the brain it also shows that the left brain which of course controls logic and balancing our checkbook and driving our car doing math and figuring out problems that side of our brain just totally goes to sleep and yet the right brain just comes online it just opens up that whole imagination realm really and so that's a pretty cool thing yeah it also helps with the immune

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Response so there's all kinds of studies that have been done now on shamanic drumming but shamans 40,000 years ago didn't need to know that to know that these methods worked and so in my 20s when I found shamanism it felt to me like a path I could follow because it wasn't taking anything from particular culture and it was allowing me to have my own spiritual authority meaning I didn't necessarily have to go to a book or a priest or a church I could get my

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Own two-way conversation and have my own tools and my own ability to answer questions and then I pursued a path in becoming a shamanic healer and teacher through learning these techniques so that's kind of that the basis of what we do and then we of course that as you grow older of course things kind of turn and you get a little side pass going to and I have some of those happening but that's our basic kind of know with the drums I mean you had a certain beat

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There do you always do like a fast beat or do you you know it's more of a fast speed all the time actually in a slower beat well it depends on the purpose but if you're doing a journey which is where we would set you up and have you imagine a place in nature that you've been to that you love and we would say this is your jumping-off point and from here you can take a journey down into the lower world which is kind of like going down through the looking-glass or going down

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Into the nature realm or going to the upper world may be going like Jack and the Beanstalk or going up the yellow brick road like a wizard or like into the into the what is that this movie a Wizard of Oz we have so that these these are actual realms that now quantum physics of course tells us that there are parallel universes right and that there is no space-time continuum you know that we can access the past present future all now these journeys let us do

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That and whether you were again in Russia or America or South America if you were journeying you were calling interestingly to some of the same places for the same purposes which were healing teaching helping people to move through life and so if I was going to take you on a journey I would use a particular drumbeat that I just did which is just that very basic and that actually has a cycle to it it alters you into that shamanic state of consciousness which

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Allows you to see with the heart or see with the strong eye and see see it's like dreaming active dreaming so it's like being in a dream but you can control what you do like okay I don't really want to be here so I'm going to go over there where's in your dream sometimes it feels as if it's just happening yeah and you can't control it and so it's a it's a way of entering that imaginary world people say to me is it in your mind or is it out there

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Somewhere and I say who cares as long as I'm getting answers to my questions I'm seeing results in people's lives for whom I'm doing this work doesn't matter to me if it's something I made up or if it's something that's external to me because to me the outer is the inner anyway and if the mind in that right brain opening is the portal into the universe great if it's all in my mind then my mind is fast so to me

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Those little details I don't get hung up on those anymore I look for results and I look for isn't helping and so the drumbeat would be pretty monotonous on purpose it keep you like and you can use the didgeridoo that with blows you're in Australia and a but not this way but could use like a horn yeah like a big you could use a a bow the string that was plucked some shamans talk about journeying to the sound of the Russian waterfall okay because it's monotonous

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And so that monotonous beat does help the brain to shift into that kind of more expanded state of consciousness but to let people know that it's time to come back in a journey because you're going to have your eyes closed and you'll be lying down with an eye covering your native shamans would be dancing and drumming and journeying but most of us because we're so steeped in that left brain culture that we live we need like a little bit of like lie down

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Cover up your eyes weird to be very quiet so there's a signal to come back and then there's a faster beat to kind of come back and return yeah at around you amazing yeah so the drums I also saw that you offer like a drum making workshop yeah this so that's happening there's one actually happening this weekend which is closed so this is a woman Jane King who just one of her life works is to create more of these kind of native drums okay and so this is

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Actually a mylar drum it's means I made out of type of plastic that you would use because they stay in tune no matter what the weather this drum which is made from gear skin local beer hides is probably flat hero's kind of flat yeah it's because it's because it's animal skin its porous and so on a humid day or humid week yeah you're not going to have a tight drum so most people that do this work will have their their their skin drum

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Also have a backup drum they would always work also for people who are vegan and don't want to use an animal there's lots of options for drumming okay so this woman who's coming this weekend she creates drums from scratch so people will come and she uses different kinds of animals and I requested that it be deer because I like to connect with the animals that are local right and so she's going to come in a group of people gather for the day

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And they'll do it as a ceremony so they won't just be like you know go in there and they'll be fun but they'll also be doing like working with making offerings to the spirit of the deer giving gratitude offering to the spirit of the wood that made the hoop so it's um done in that kind of a respectful way for for all the materials and then it then it's charged and given power so that when you use it you've really got that kind of personal connection to your tool you

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Know this is I've said it before but it's really truly fascinating and you know you're working with nature the whole time basically you know absolutely yeah mm-hmm so also with the shamanism I'm I noticed that there's one program that you offer um that work with is it the dyeing yes okay and that's coming up in September right so it's is it sort of with a hospice place it is it's actually kind of a spiritual Hospice so as I was speaking earlier one of those classic or

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Core technique because it goes across cultures is what we call the psychopomp not psycho crazy but psycho meaning soul okay and pump not pump up at pump and meaning conductor so psycho pump is the conductor of souls and that is one of the classic roles of the shaman regardless of whatever culture again is to help the soul move through life for example this workshop is on helping people at the moment of dying or people who have died or those who are losing a

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Loved one working with that soul aspect so it is like hospice only it's taking it even further and making sure that the person gets kind of safely Ali Alisa yeah because there are you know if you are if you die in a very quick or sudden or traumatic way there is confusion around death sometimes and so one of these roles is just to make sure you know when there are tragedies in the world where people die suddenly often a

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Group of us will do a journey there see if we can help with those traumatised souls I see if they need a little help getting out and you know so this is one of those classic roles and in the beginning of life too if you've ever been at birth or given birth you know that it can be a little touch-and-go sometimes and in a traditional culture the shaman was a spiritual mid rope Midwife not doing that Burak but to help that soul kind of move through his hairs

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Or her life so making sure that baby soul gets fully into the body then at those points where we're making that turn from child to adolescent from adolescent to teen from teen to young adult from single person to marry those rites of passage times are also times that the shaman can help tend the soul and you know one of my teachers bill Plotkin from the Animus Institute he has a couple books and one of the books talks about how we are in this culture

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Really stuck in early adolescence in terms of our evolution of consciousness so when you think about what's going on in the world sure we all are children and then we have middle childhood and then we have early adolescence and late adolescence but as a culture largely we are still like middle schoolers really okay in terms of I mean look at what's in charge in the world and look at what look at what some of the values are and look at what some of the competition is

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And he says that we need to help mature each other and mature this culture and so one of the things that we like to do is for hallways our camps which just to try to help children to have some more tools to help them on the not just a spiritual level but to connect with their own inner knowing to connect with each other in a very meaningful way to connect with elders starting to call myself an early elder now to connect with with elders who were

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Trying to help them move through life as we would have done if we lived in more of a communal tribal culture we would have helped people to move through life so that psychopomp or conductor of souls role is to help people through life and my friend Robert who is teaching that particular workshop he's also my co-teacher for seeing with the heart which is our longer ongoing shamanic training he's also the board president at spirit hall

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Because we are also a 501 C 3 and nonprofit okay he he has a particular interest in around death and around death and dying and helping create ritual ceremony around that so that if somebody is dying and knows they're dying to be able to be with that person but also to help them to come to grips with their deaths but also to help them to maybe even plan their whole ceremony but they want to have as a real honor to their life and have them do some

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Unfinished business with their loved ones and help the loved ones I'll get ok with this process because as you know holding on to people is a big thing if somebody doesn't want their loved one to go and I think our society today doesn't like to talk about death absolu and if you have a loved one that has passed away and you can talk about that person everybody sort of like looks at you as though you've got three screws loose I agree I agree now it's not to dwell on

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It but you remember these people they were part of your life and you miss them yeah and I mean I've been to like my cousin's house and after dinner is over they'll ask questions about you know death and dying and stuff and it's not that I know a lot about it but studying and learning and you get people to talk about it and I think it helps us to confront um you know our journey better a part of our journey and from our point of view

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And there's a beautiful quote from Chief Seattle and it is there is no deaf only a change of world and I think that certain cultures do do death better than we do it and we're afraid and we hold on and we keep people alive at all costs and perhaps it's time to let them go you know I just had a one of my dearest animal companions one of my dogs died about two weeks ago after being diagnosed with lymphoma just a month before and I have had these two dogs

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Twin brothers from having since there are five weeks old in there are only eight and a half and so was it it was very difficult but what was beautiful about what he did I was away the night the night before I came home he died my boyfriend was there my children he went out under a lilac bush that was in bloom lay down and left his body there was no vet intervention there was no medication he was just like this body's done and I'm going to walk right out of my suit

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And it was like such an incredible teaching about holding on and just like that's the way to die right go ahead lie under a blooming lilac bush which smells awesome yeah and just leave your body and of course now I miss him and we're all kind of still mourning him but what a beautiful teaching and how we could be letting go and realizing that we're just switching form and his soul is still with you yeah yeah absolutely yeah we just have to learn that not to

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Hold them yeah and what we are doing here on earth these are just temporary exactly on suits if you will I love that ya know right so what is your typical summer camp like right kids this is some of the most important work I think we do is our work we do with with the young one you know I do feel a sense of moral obligation to the kids we have handed and I have two teenagers who've grown up doing these camps but I feel that given the state of the world

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In particular my heartbreak is the environment and climate change in the way we've created this problem that is not so much our concern about the earth as much as the concern about human beings being able to survive on on a changed earth so I feel that given this kind of set of things we've handed our kids like here we've screwed it up pretty badly you take it now fix it Sharon Sears now we're going to go into retirement or

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Whatever I feel like giving children tools to navigate these Uncharted Seas that we're asking them to go into we don't know what's going to be like to grow food in this environment to have climate refugees to have you know displaced people and you know all the kind of things that could happen with rising seas etc we need to give them some tools so the day can get through I believe we can and so one of the things I hope to do is to offer them ways to

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Connect with nature more I believe that if we're going to live in a changed environment one of our tools can be to work closely with the place we're closely with the spiritual aspects of nature as our ancestors did and as people who still live close to nature do they learn from the plants they learn from the place they are taught by the place where to grow things how to grow them and when you work in a co-creative way with your place amazing things will

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Happen I have so many magical stories like that about spirit Hollow and about working with the spiritual aspect of the place so to give the children the ability to connect with nature in that way to trust their inner guidance and not think they have to always be on a device to get information to use sacred primitive technologies in a sense to get amazing information that you're not googling to connect in authentic communication so we sit in circles and

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We use something called a way of council which is passing a talking piece and only the person who has a talking piece gets to speak there's no cross talk it's deep listening deep respect speaking from the heart and nobody's standing at the head of the class everybody's in a circle so there's giving them techniques that are about authentic communication teaching them to use their bodies in nature teaching them how to identify a true

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Eze how to look for animal tracks what foods can be eaten in the woods to get out and use their body hike and to really be make make art write some poetry we just have a great time and originally we had spirit quest camp which which was friend is for boys and girls and then we would kind of split off one afternoon to just do some stuff in a group of girls and do some stuff in a group of boys so that because you know regardless of how we want to go for kind

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Of a balance of genders there are certain things growth want to sit around and do and boys want to get out and they want to hike a mountain no not that girls don't want to do that and boys don't want to do the other but out of that grew our goddess camp for girls which is about kind of getting really into the Sacred Feminine and we will we will do a lot with body image and self-esteem and healthy eating will also do ceremony dressed in your favorite

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Kind of clothes that make you feel authentically beautiful we will do you know dream journeys we do ceremony dancing by the stream we make food together we just have a great time and then there's warrior camp which was co-created with me and a couple of young men who've worked for me for several years and and by warrior we mean like authentic warriors and we not worriers you want to kill things but warriors who want to be in their power and who want

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To respect each other and want to be into their emotional intelligence want to respect women and girls as well as go hike a mountain and carve staffs and mix beers and and so we're trying to give people these tools and have them and also just have a great time you know this sounds immediate fun and it's great to be able to run around with kids in the woods in the summer and and that's my work for the summer so I really look forward to that now do you have them

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Like freaking out because they can't have the cell phone and the computer and the ads and not so much I mean most of the Cancer day camps so they do get the Jews all over the end of the day it's a further than a Thursday night sleepover but the teen camp that is six nights a stay at Spirit Harlow and we have tent cabins with bunks in them and we cook together we really get like a tribe okay and we only let them use their their to their device while we're

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Cooking dinner for like from 4 to 6 and that's it that's it and they know that and that boy I'll tell you it for they're like but then today no it's going to go off and that's just how it is and I think they appreciate just having that break because it does exhaust us I think so into that like device yeah that's a good break you know because I had done retreats before wooden teenagers and oh yeah one of the things we did I worked as a youth

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Minister and when they came in at the beginning we collected all of the watches and we covered all the phases of the great yeah and it was like total freak out it's like we mean I can't my watch you know having it's a watch yeah imagine if you try picking her iPhone away but anyway some so it's a really good learning experience for them not to have to depend and the connections that they make are so authentic and so deep that it just I think you know by the

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First a second day they're already immersed in that kind of outside of time-space you know this some this program is basically you know getting to know Tracy and what Spirit Hollow has to offer us so it sort of is giving you the audience a lot of information and I'm finding it fascinating and I've got a few more questions for Tracy about a couple of other programs that they have so bear with us here we go okay well thanks for watching um the October you

00:39:18

Have a freaking steins monster and Stone Soup Saturday so this is our attempt through Robert my president of the board and the one is doing the psychopomp workshop to reach out to men as you may know from I've got a lot of your guests on your show or women I bet a lot of the people that you know are in the kind of alternative health or healing fields are women and so I think the attempt here in our sin our shamanic programs I would say and this is

00:39:47

Nationally kind of I think reflected at most wellness centers and retreat centers is you have it 75 to 80 percent of your participants as women and so we're trying to kind of open that up and and see where and so Robert has been having a couple meetings with some local men to try to create and shape what do men need and how can men be more spiritual or grow in that way and what do they want and so this is his attempt to kind of reach out to men and it's a

00:40:19

Free event open to the public and it has to do with men coming together bringing not just something for the soup but bringing something to offer to the group okay so that they could begin to unravel you know that that that relationship with their creator or with their sacred just like Frankenstein was trying to unravel his relationship with his creator and so it's just a metaphor for I think I think what he's been finding is that a lot of

00:40:51

Men want to do something physical as well they don't want to just sit around in a circle and talk they want to build something or make something or do something and so that's going to be incorporated and we're perhaps going to do some trail marking and cutting that day I mean I won't be present it'll be just for the men yes so this is his attempt to reach out more to to the men and I've been doing the goddess retreats for women for the last five or six years

00:41:16

And those are always closed and always well attended and so we really feel like we want everybody to be included and we want to serve that larger population include the men very good idea yeah because I think you know with them like a men's day or a men's weekend or something like that I think it incorporates them into the grand scheme of things sometimes they probably might think that they're too macho or athletic or

00:41:49

Something to get involved with this and I think it's a great thankfully yeah well I think it's also a little fear of the unknown as well I mean we have found that in teaching people to do the journey which I was describing earlier men typically have us have more of a separation between the two sides of the brain and you can see this in scientific research then you know we do have two brains and they're connected by the corpus callosum and

00:42:19

There needs to be jumping back and forth between those and I'm not saying scientists but I do know that and men have a more developed left brain typically not always of course men women women have a more integrated approach between their two sides of their brain and so I think for men it did more little more difficult to journey and to not think they're making it up or to fill it's a success and for women it's a we even though I feel that we have got

00:42:46

To break the patriarchy and allow women our power I think men have also suffered in a patriarchal culture and certainly a lot of the men that I know and love are more wanting to connect more in their hearts and they're wanting to be allowed to express their emotions in ways that aren't just the typical ways of being masculine and yet there aren't a lot of models for how you do that and and so you know part of this is just allowing and creating a space for men to explore

00:43:18

And to to connect with something greater and more community-minded great idea really um one of the other things that I saw in your site is like a sweat lodge type thing what is a typical sweat lodge experience like so I have a woman Maggie Murphy who has been participating in sweat lodges for 25 years or more sweat lodges are often most known in their native american form but they are also have been done all through the northern hemisphere so even

00:43:51

The scandinavian sauna was originally a sacred place to go and pray and the heat toll and so it's it's a ceremony that happens once a month usually on a Sunday those are again free and open to the public and the dates are on the website and you you come into a wigwam type structure that's covered with blankets hot stones that have been heated in a fire for about two hours till they're red-hot are brought in and put in the center water is poured

00:44:21

It's like a sauna but you're on the earth and people are singing drumming praying purifying both their body and their spirits Wow and four rounds are done one for each of the four directions and at which point the flaps are open more stones are brought in people can get out and come back if they need to if it gets too hot but so my ex-husband used to do those and then when he moved on Maggie took that whole thing over and she does it with a lot of integrity and

00:44:50

Beauty so yeah it's very good yeah my bad friend in Ohio said it's just a hot prayer circle okay I'm not quite bit a little bit like that well speaking of hot um I know that this past weekend Memorial Day weekend you also had like the fire walking was Stephanie Foy yeah was there what is that like I mean do other people get involved with is it like walking on stones or it's walking on hot coals okay actually from a fire okay and so Stephanie is a certified

00:45:27

Fire walk instructor with 11 years of experience okay so she's walking on fire thousands of times and we've had we've been doing fireworks at Spirit Hollow with Stephanie for probably ten years and it's not just something you would try at home right right so she has techniques that build up your your own ability to use your mind over fear all right and so there's the fire is lit in a ceremonial way it's a big fire bigger than this table six to eight feet

00:45:59

Of a square with logs okay everybody participates in creating the fire with putting a prayer and intention and the fire is lit and then somebody acts as a fire tender while Stephanie and the participants go into the yard or the workshop space and they do a bunch of exercises to build up their their ability to break through fear and nobody who comes is required to walk on the fire if you don't want to certainly don't have to so the fire

00:46:27

Burns down for like two hours and then once it's just coals basically the coals are raked out until they're nice and smooth and it's like a six to eight foot kind of walk okay and then you walk with intention like I'm walking for this person I'm walking to break through this fear or I'm hoping to transform this and you've raised your energy to meet the fire this is the thinking and therefore you don't get burned because you are focused you're in your power and you're

00:47:01

Breaking through and so it's a very powerful visual and physical way to focus your energy and break through things and because you can say well if I walked on fire what else can I do in my life yeah without being held back by fear which is one of the things that holds a lot of us back is the fear of the unknown or the fear of failure or the fear of oh I'm not good enough you know we all have those messages that we've been bodied since the time we were

00:47:30

Probably little yes very interesting very powerful yeah it's it's really wonderful it is mm-hmm well we've got a few more minutes before we have to wrap up and can you just tell our viewers what the sage smudge is a lot of Apple we're wondering like what the stage have to do this and I know from experience working with an energy healer in the wells Pollard area you know like when you go to her she has sage and she does a smudge

00:48:09

To like is it clear yes and make this race so this is white sage which grows in the West um and most cultures burn some kind of some kind of something to clear the energy also to signal now we're entering sacred space because the you know the smell and you know when you smell a certain smell from childhood like baking bread you're back at your grandmother's house so there's signals to the conch now we're going to shift out of our

00:48:38

Ordinary consciousness into sacred space so that's part of it and the other part is that smudging which is just burning it and kind of you know waving the smoke around the person's body or around your own body it's meant to clear out just the gunk you know we have energy bodies around us and we do pick up the best illustration of this I have is when you ride on an airplane and you get off the airplane at least I do and I feel like I feel like yeah I don't know you know the

00:49:04

Air is kind of yucky but also just bumping into so many people right emotional energy fields that I feel like budging a big eraser you do after a plane trip just to clear you out and prepare you for the sacred space and so different cultures would maybe use different herbs but this is one that is kind of native to America and the significance of the rattle is like just like the drum drum so you know mine is this is i'ma rattle

00:49:29

I made the owl is a totem of spirit Hollow because we live in prime barred owl habitat and so we're always hearing the owls or seeing the owls and for me it's a personally it's the animal that I used to do healing work for others okay just another thing to do at spirit hollow is personal one-on-one healing sessions okay which you can read about on the on the website so like you said you have some fox around you and you might have a little fox on your

00:49:58

Dashboard or on your computer screen and for me it's the owl but using the rattle just like eugenia drum same kind of monotonous ease to invoke the spirits do Fixer consciousness so I worked with a combination of rattles drums I also sing and and whistle and you know just kind of spontaneously working that way Wow so after 25 years I've got left turn singles in my tool belt yeah that's good well for the last 50 minutes Traci forest from the spirit of hallow inch

00:50:36

Asbury has been telling us about the different works that they do there what their mission is and giving us Oh My heavens of really good things that you can experience by going there there are a lot of free workshops that you have there are some workshops that there's a fee for and I do believe that I read that there are scholarships that are available as well yeah so if you you know are on a fixed income or don't

00:51:17

Think you can afford it you can always be in contact with Tracy and her board or whoever and you know like apply for a scholarship salutely you know Spirit Hollow again is on a chest very Hollow Road and I say it's in chasteberry it isn't just very I pay taxes in Sharia but our mailing address is north many kids okay you know that Iraqi yeah huh and you can get ahold of Tracy at eight zero two four four seven three eight nine five or you can email her if you

00:51:55

Just go to the website there's a contact for the email to I don't want to give that long edge or and it's what WW spirit hollow lrg okay very good thank you and if you forget all of that sort of good stuff you can always get ahold of me here on Monday Wednesdays or Fridays at eight oh two four four two eight eight six eight and I can put you in contact with Tracy so I hope you have enjoyed our mind picking event with Tracy today again I want to remind you

00:52:36

Of the audience you know if you have any serious illnesses or anything like that talk to your primary care physician before you try something new to you know make sure that it's okay for you to do a lot of these programs and spirit at Spirit hollow excuse me are really great and be very helpful to people only and I would like to invite you to come back to see us again and I'd like to invite Tracy to come back and see us again

00:53:12

Thank you this has been a whirlwind hour thank you very much for having all you very all for watching and leave come to spirit Hollow and see what beautiful things we have to offer including the beautiful land that is yeah and I spoke to Traci before we started the program she is going to send in things for the bulletin board at cat TV that she's offering its Spirit Hollow so if you you know like don't always get to the computer to check out the website and

00:53:47

You're watching channel 15 or 16 with a community bulletin board here at cat TV in the future you may see different offerings from Spirit Hollow so I'd like to thank you again everybody and come back and see us again thank you thank you [Music]