By Lena Stevens
What are we facing in 2019 and how can we make the best of it using the right shamanic practices, tools and support?
In Shamanism, it is always helpful to know your tools and how and when to use them to support what you are trying to accomplish.
2019 promises to be an interesting year with the influences of highly creative and highly destructive energies coming up against solid, grounded, familiar, and often calcified structures. In shamanic terms, the need for personal transformation and change is faced with old patterns of resistance, fear, doubt and uncertainty. How are we going to navigate these opposites?
Creativity and destruction are two sides of the same coin. When you create something, you are automatically destroying the form of at least one of your ingredients. When you create a meal, you are destroying the original form of the food you are using for the dish. At the beginning of the year many of us are focused on what we want to create for ourselves over the next several months. In order to have all of our creative ingredients fully available we must be willing to destroy their old form. We are very resistant to the idea of destruction as it has a reputation of being a negative behavior, however we need to consider destruction as a positive and necessary aspect of any creative endeavor.
What would you need to destroy from last year in order to have the ingredients you need to create something new for this year? Let’s start with attachments. Where are you attached to what you did or did not achieve last year? Are those attachments filled with pride, regret, or feelings of failure or success? To the extent that you are attached to any of it, you are not free to create something new because your ingredients are unwilling to be changed.
In my fridge, I had leftovers of pasta sauce, a potato dish and a vegetable soup. Being unattached to serving these old meals up in their original form, I threw everything into a blender, added some fresh spices, a little liquid and out came a delicious new cream soup.
Your intentions from last year are like old meals. Some manifested well, some did not. The residual attachments are like the leftovers. You need to be willing to either toss them out or remake them into something new. The successes become part of your foundation and point of reference, but they are also in the past and any attachment to them to feed your ego will only hold you back.
We advise making an inventory of all that you intended for yourself last year and take a fresh and truthful look at what manifested and what did not. From a place of neutrality, acknowledge what manifested well and without effort, and what just never came together. Releasing all of it, decide with fresh eyes what to continue, what to release, what to recreate with some new ingredients. If you never found that perfect place to live, release the attachment, destroy the old picture, reframe your approach and refine that intention. If you did not manifest your intention for perfect health, destroy the attachment, let go of the disappointment and take a truthful look at what ingredient might have been missing.
Working consciously with the tools of creativity and destruction will insure a constant level of energy movement which will then counteract resistance, fear, uncertainty, and the tendency for getting stuck in old patterns. Resistance is often felt in the body as a stubborn quality that goes along with the fear of change. Even if you are someone who prides themselves in being proactive with change and adventure, you can still fall into an old pattern of believing that your intentions will always manifest or not manifest in the same way as they always have.
We have the element of the Earth as a strong ally this year. The grounded properties of the earth as an energy can either add to the feeling of being stuck, resistant and calcified, or they can help to anchor some of our new intentions. Let’s use the Earth this year as a supportive ally for fertility, vitality, new energy and “food” for our intentions. It would be a good daily practice to honor the life-giving support of the Earth and to specifically ask for help in the area of fertilizing and feeding our new intentions with vitality, wisdom and right timing.
Have a great year!
Lena Stevens
