I call it adding the element of fire, color, and oils to my prayer.
I don’t typically share my prayers, but this one is significant, so I plant the seed.
Tonight, I light a seven day white candle for the Blue Clan family.
White is for purity, new beginnings, fresh starts, peace and tranquility.
“Creator, please bless our family’s hearts with renewal. Let us come together in a good way, with love, honor and respect, so we may be a healthy family, supportive of each other, with open hearts and minds. Let us see the bigger picture, and not a narrow view. Let our Prinicple White Chief be honored and respected as the Spiritual Leader and Guide that he is. May we be willing and able to accept his wisdom, and support him as we learn from him, the traditions, with a humble and compassionate heart.”
Candle is dressed with the prayer, rose geranium essential oil for Love, and Frankinsence and Myrhh for the protection of our Spirits as we navigate this new beginning.
I love you all. I am grateful for this family. Let us be healed.
A child who wasn’t able to emotionally develop, becomes the adult who: takes everything personally, is highly defensive, & struggles to voice what they actually feel.
HERE’S WHY
Our emotional development happens beginning at birth & through childhood, where we learn: how to identify and regulate our emotions.
Emotional maturity comes from this process.
In order to learn this, we need to be modeled it by a parent figure.
If we’re raised in a home where we are parentified (made to be the emotional caretaker for a parent), where a parent is too busy or overworked, or where a parents rage or emotional instability runs the climate of the home— we don’t get to emotionally develop.
The sole focus becomes staying safe in the environment.
So, we cope with hypervigilance.
Hypervigilance is the attunement to the environment. Meaning, we sense everyone else’s emotions or shift in facial expressions or behavior.
We know when a parents mood is going to shift & how that will impact us, when we might be blamed or shamed, or when a parent might withdraw from us completely (ie: the silent treatment.)
We learn & adapt quickly to caretaking the emotions of those around us. Or managing those emotions the best we can as children.
Sometimes this is mistaken as empathy— it’s not.
It’s a survival mechanism.
Long term hypervigilance creates nervous system dysregulation.
We become high reactive to those around us because we’ve learned that people are not safe & we must defend ourselves.
Everything feels personal, because at one time in our lives: it was.
With our awareness on the external, this leaves little time for self awareness, self reflection, or emotional regulation.
The result: we are emotionally immature.
Unable to know what we feel, how to express it, or if it’s even ok to feel what we feel (many of us have been shamed for our emotions: “stop being dramatic,” “don’t be so sensitive” “man up.”)
In earliest years we were made responsible for adult emotions.
The Arrows path is straight and narrow, its target is the heart. At the heart of every Warrior is the compassion of the Chief and the legacy of leadership for the good of all people. All races of the Earth Mother depend on the Rainbow Warriors of the world to reform the Warrior Brotherhood in order to accomplish the fulfillment of the Fifth World of Peace. For this to occur we must use the teaching of the Arrow, that is, using total truth as our weapons and our protection.
Find the truth of your present situation. You can protect yourself from uncomfortable situations by using the truth as protection. It doesn’t matter what others think of you. You know the truth. When you honor that truth, you cannot be hurt by the lies of others.
Arrow also speaks of the ideas of Brotherhood. This is to say that you must armor yourself with good intent and truthfulness of those you wish to associate with. Drop those who no longer honor your path or truth. Remember: Arrow is straight and always says, “Stay on The Sacred Path.”
~ Sacred Path cards, The discovery of Self through Native teachings, by Jamie Sams
“In the course of my lifetime I have lived in two distinct cultures. I was born into a culture that lived in communal houses. My grandfather’s house was eighty feet long. It was called a smoke house, and it stood down by the beach along the inlet. All my grandfather’s sons and their families lived in this dwelling. Their sleeping apartments were separated by blankets made of bull rush weeds, but one open fire in the middle served the cooking needs of all.
In houses like these, throughout the tribe, people learned to live with one another; learned to respect the rights of one another. And children shared the thoughts of the adult world and found themselves surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins who loved them and did not threaten them. My father was born in such a house and learned from infancy how to love people and be at home with them.
And beyond this acceptance of one another there was a deep respect for everything in Nature that surrounded them. My father loved the Earth and all its creatures. The Earth was his second mother. The Earth and everything it contained was a gift from See-see-am… and the way to thank this Great Spirit was to use his gifts with respect.
I remember, as a little boy, fishing with him up Indian River and I can still see him as the sun rose above the mountain top in the early morning…I can see him standing by the water’s edge with his arms raised above his head while he softly moaned…”Thank you, thank you.” It left a deep impression on my young mind.
And I shall never forget his disappointment when once he caught me gaffing for fish “just for the fun of it.” “My son” he said, “The Great Spirit gave you those fish to be your brothers, to feed you when you are hungry. You must respect them. You must not kill them just for the fun of it.”
This then was the culture I was born into and for some years the only one I really knew or tasted. This is why I find it hard to accept many of the things I see around me.
I see people living in smoke houses hundreds of times bigger than the one I knew. But the people in one apartment do not even know the people in the next and care less about them.
It is also difficult for me to understand the deep hate that exists among people. It is hard to understand a culture that justifies the killing of millions in past wars, and it at this very moment preparing bombs to kill even greater numbers. It is hard for me to understand a culture that spends more on wars and weapons to kill, than it does on education and welfare to help and develop.
It is hard for me to understand a culture that not only hates and fights his brothers but even attacks Nature and abuses her. I see my white brothers going about blotting out Nature from his cities. I see him strip the hills bare, leaving ugly wounds on the face of mountains. I see him tearing things from the bosom of Mother Earth as though she were a monster, who refused to share her treasures with him. I see him throw poison in the waters, indifferent to the life he kills there; as he chokes the air with deadly fumes.
My white brother does many things well for he is more clever than my people but I wonder if he has ever really learned to love at all. Perhaps he only loves the things that are his own but never learned to love the things that are outside and beyond him. And this is, of course, not love at all, for man must love all creation or he will love none of it. Man must love fully or he will become the lowest of the animals. It is the power to love that makes him the greatest of them all… for he alone of all animals is capable of [a deeper] love.
My friends, how desperately do we need to be loved and to love. When Christ said man does not live by bread alone, he spoke of a hunger. This hunger was not the hunger of the body.. He spoke of a hunger that begins in the very depths of man… a hunger for love. Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look out confidently at the world. Instead we turn inwardly and begin to feed upon our own personalities and little by little we destroy ourselves.
You and I need the strength and joy that comes from knowing that we are loved. With it we are creative. With it we march tirelessly. With it, and with it alone, we are able to sacrifice for others. There have been times when we all wanted so desperately to feel a reassuring hand upon us… there have been lonely times when we so wanted a strong arm around us… I cannot tell you how deeply I miss my wife’s presence when I return from a trip. Her love was my greatest joy, my strength, my greatest blessing.
I am afraid my culture has little to offer yours. But my culture did prize friendship and companionship. It did not look on privacy as a thing to be clung to, for privacy builds walls and walls promote distrust. My culture lived in big family communities, and from infancy people learned to live with others.
My culture did not prize the hoarding of private possessions, in fact, to hoard was a shameful thing to do among my people. The Indian looked on all things in Nature as belonging to him and he expected to share them with others and to take only what he needed.
Everyone likes to give as well as receive. No one wishes only to receive all the time. We have taken something from your culture… I wish you had taken something from our culture, for there were some beautiful and good things in it.
Soon it will be too late to know my culture, for integration is upon us and soon we will have no values but yours. Already many of our young people have forgotten the old ways. And many have been shamed of their Indian ways by scorn and ridicule. My culture is like a wounded deer that has crawled away into the forest to bleed and die alone.
The only thing that can truly help us is genuine love. You must truly love, be patient with us and share with us. And we must love you—with a genuine love that forgives and forgets… a love that forgives the terrible sufferings your culture brought ours when it swept over us like a wave crashing along a beach… with a love that forgets and lifts up its head and sees in your eyes an answering love of trust and acceptance…”
I love it when sincerity and transparency makes some people think me a little “off” … hahahha, the truth isn’t for everyone. But I know the right people love me, just the same … and I am grateful for them.
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