Quotes from Steven D. Farmer

As the traditional healer Makhosi Petros Hezekial Mtshali tells us, Ancestors are benevolent beings who love us. You are their legacy, and they want the best for their progeny. Their own evolution in the Otherworld depends upon the completion of unfinished business or making amends for unkind acts or deeds that they may have committed during their lifetime.

Waking up from the cultural trance may require you to challenge your most fundamental beliefs and step outside of societal norms. When this happens, you discover new insights about yourself and typically go through a revision of who you are and what your relationship with the Earth is.

Consciousness—not the personal you—created your body and your surroundings that provide support for that body to exist.

There are four conditions that can either block or distort spiritual messages, making it more difficult to discern whether the message is coming from Spirit or is ego-generated. These are grief, pain, selfpity, and aggression without cause.

Creator and Creation are singular—that Source or God is all; the dark and the light, male and female, creation and destruction, death and resurrection. In that sense, there is nothing that exists or occurs that is not Source.

There are four things our ancestors need from us: acknowledgment, validation, understanding, and forgiveness.

No matter the stated purpose, sacred ceremony inevitably helps heal the fundamental spiritual wound—the illusion of separateness from the Creator and Creation. By our participation, we're reassured that we're not autonomous from that which sustains us materially and spiritually, and reminded of our place within the vast and intricate network of life.

Your animal spirit guide finds great joy in working with you and experiencing ordinary reality through your physical senses, and you get an animal spirit guide that counsels, heals, and empowers you.

All neuroses are merely adult forms of whining and pouting.

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people. —Thich Nhat Hanh, Present Moment Wonderful Moment

When we heal ourselves, we heal the past, the present, and the future.

Ancestors are benevolent beings who love us. You are their legacy, and they want the best for their progeny. Their own evolution in the Otherworld depends upon the completion of unfinished business or making amends for unkind acts or deeds that they may have committed during their lifetime.

Ceremony is the intentful construction of the bridge which spans the barriers that we've created between our soul and our mundane life. Through the creation of ceremony, we allow the free movement of our soul into the mundane and of our consciousness in the realm of soul. It's a two-way bridge.

Ceremony, whether or not it's shamanic, is typically magical, creative, and healing, and provides a bridge between the material and spirit worlds. It's a felt demonstration of how the power of the universe works, and it provides an excellent way to honor all those events in our lives that we want to sanctify. Participating in sacred ceremony helps us bring our being into alignment with the natural flow and rhythm of life.

By participating in ceremonies such as this one, people often find themselves in a rapturous state, experiencing a profound and ancient knowing at a soul level. Through the mythos always present in sacred ceremonies—that vast reservoir of species memory represented in symbols, songs, dances, and stories, all of which have common themes and mythologies cross-culturally—we find a common ground with all of humanity.