This week, gently consider where soul sustenance has become rote. This is a bold undertaking from inside the comfort zone.

Normalization of the journey experience isn't failure. It's natural, it's progress, integration. The act of journeying is a relationship, not just the connections we make from it.

Take time to reflect on your healing story. Write it down, if it helps, or draw it, paint it. Express all of the feelings wrapped into your experience of the healing process, and know that in doing so, we all heal. We all move closer to wellness.

"Rivers know this; there is no hurry, we shall get there some day." -- Winnie the Pooh "Too many times we confuse motion with progress." -- Albert Ei...

To create and sustain soul healing we must bring some sort of awareness into everything that we do. When we decide that we want to heal, we must become active participants in that process.

In all, I took the off-road adventure, self-creating my own shamanic path without the guideposts and maps we are used to finding on spiritual quests, a feat common to many modern seekers on broken paths in this cultural melting pot.

"Bouncing is what Tiggers do best. -- Tigger, from A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh Since the birth of our twins a little over three years ago, I've de...

While I do experience that the soul in some guise persists after the form expires, I most definitely experience that our life as well as our physical death are highly relevant events in our soul's growth.

As you decorate for this season, think about the totems that are important to you and the reason that they move you. Are they traditional to your family or religion? Have you discovered new totems as you explore personal meanings of the season?

The thing is, there isn't anything special about people who experience spirits and those who don't. The difference is willingness and the taming of cultural domestication to see life in a fuller, less-prescribed way.

The path of shamanism in the West is a curious thing. The dogmatic world religions of our ancestors are crumbling as institutions no longer meet the needs of the modern spiritual seeker.

To those of us who revere nature and the future generations as sacred, this oil slick is an emotional and intellectual catastrophe.

It is difficult for some of us to say "God thinks each of us into being" without feeling like we're falling back on childhood Sunday school stories.