The genius of an ant goes far beyond human understanding

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Horse shoes

In the previous post i talked about how my legs changed into horse legs during a mediation. This weird experience suddenly reminded me after i posted it of a pair of shoes a friend of mine during art school, Monique van den Hout had made. She had designed and made them back then. It must be more then twenty five years ago now. These shoes always had stuck in my mind, because i used to like them a lot. And as it turns out so does Saatchi gallery 

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Assimilating with my animal guide

The painting of the white horse journey is coming to its ending faze. I had some struggles with it because I had real trouble letting go of attaching to an end result. I was very focused on giving an accurate description of my journey, and wanted to paint just that. That was before I understood a tiny tiny little more of what shamanic painting is. Like the aspect of letting the painting talk to you essentially.. But hey, let’s not leave the impression that I know anything about shamanic painting now.  What I try to say is that I understood even less then nothing a few weeks ago...

You know I hope I don’t bore anyone because I really need to write all this stuff down right here on my blog.  Because doing that leads me to see connections from a different perspective then when I would write it down in a dairy form and just for my own eyes to see. I am discovering all sorts of new connections though writing for you. I have always wanted to write a book when I would grow up..Well maybe this blog is a start.. 

But okay,  back to the journey. What I wanted to talk about is that I had this really weird experience with the white horse after I took my journey.  The day I took the journey was the same day I had my first session with a teacher to lift my energy work up onto a more professional level. I wrote about that fabulous learning experience in this post.  Anyway, back to the white horse... that evening I did a guided mediation for the learning session with my teacher and in that mediation the white horse re-appeared. But in  a totally unexpected way. 

During meditating I felt my legs change into horse legs, white horse legs. But i also changed in my upper body, I wore a red Capulet. And I felt I was looking like a person from the middle ages. Could not quite figure out if I was male or female, I tend more towards male, but with a feminine kind of boyish energy. It was so so weird, I have never had something like a change of body occur to me during a meditation before.  And then on top of that I did not even change into a another human but into a half animal half human.. Actually when I write this down I changed into a centaur when you consider I had (white)horse legs. And wow, now that I think of this I wrote a post a few days ago about the cornflower. Which has been my favorite flower  for as long as I can remember, so I researched its symbolic meaning and learned that this flower has as Latin name, Cyanus, which has come from the centaur. Wow, is this what it feels like?? When the subconscious starts talking to me through its web of archetypical symbols and images to give me messages about who I am and where I need to go to be on my true path??  

I feel that the main message I got from the white horse Is I that I should release all tendency towards wanting to control situations that are tender and purely made out of emotions. Just leave them as they are, leave them be and go with their flow...without wanting to be the driver of those situations. without attachment to a certain outcome and trying to steer the car that way! In surrendering my desire to steer not only will my physical health improve but also I feel clearly that my emotional health will benefit. And I also believe that any situation will flow, where it is supposed to go. For me this is a tough one to live by. As I always was the one in the driver’s seat. In earthly (money/work) matters I still feel I have to take charge firmly. Maybe that needs to change as well, to leave air to breathe for me and let more abundance flow in to my life naturally.  It’s just so hard to live in faith and surrender when you feel like ( like I do) that you have always had to do everything by yourself. I realize now that I took the drives seat as much as I could to create a sense of safety for myself. Safety has always been a scares state of being in my life. Originating where it originates from for everybody, early childhood. 

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White horse

 Picture source here

I haven’t written anything specific about my first shamanic journey. As the last week of the Visual Quest painting course is almost ending. I feel i really need and want to share this experience here. It has been a deeply transformative proces and all i learned has been a huge magical discovery for me. It feels i have now a tool and so many more possibilities to bring my 'real self' into my art work. Its amazing, it's like an opening for a deeper relationship with what i create. I have now tools to connect on a totally different level with my paintings, much deeper then it ever was possible.

With being given the possibilty to participate in the course Visual Quest I feel i have been shown a doorway to go ‘underground’ and meet consciously with my sub-consciousness. I feel really excited in exploring this further. I want to learn to listen carefully to the messages and looking around me when I am there to absorb what I see with as much detail as possible. The animal I met with was a white horse. The message passed by that horse to me during  the journey was I believe to help me go forward in life, in the way that’s best for me. To help me get or stay on my right path..Now I need to figure out what horses stand for and in particular what white horses stand for. And then try to really ‘feel-out’ what it was trying to tell me.

Right now i'm still working on my 'white horse painting'. I will post pictures of it later today..

The concept of the spirit guided message:

It’s important thing to remember about an animal guide and totem is that they are not magic and cannot truly benefit individuals unless they accept the guidance the guides offer and internalize the special qualities of the animal in order to consciously externalize those qualities in outward behavior.

No totem or spiritual guide would lead people to negative or destructive behaviors. You must consider how the animal, with its strengths and positive qualities, is speaking to your own personal spiritual life. Through the exploration of the spiritual meaning on a personal level, animal guides can remind you to call on your reserve of strengths to achieve a more peaceful and rewarding existence.

- Miriam Dunn

I went  looking online to see what spirit guide horses have to tell us  and in particular what a white horse guides tells us. While doing so I came across some beautiful messages, explanations and archetypal descriptions of horse guides.

Here is some of my beautiful findings, the first one is totally matching the message I have been given in my journey. It blew me away as I have found out almost two weeks after my journey that this was exactly the message the white horse has given me.

·         The horse possesses many virtues that are powerful and valuable and which any person would be wise to internalize. The gift of the horse is to release any desire to be in control. the best way to go is to surrender to the horse’s (as I read it ‘to life’)being which in return allows the horse to carry its charge forward on his or hers true path. Thus horse medicine is complete surrender of ego!!! 

·         A horse will only bond with someone it trusts. ... When a horse bonds with its owner, there is mutual respect and cooperation. Bonding requires patience because it takes time and is an ongoing process. Bonding requires spending quality time together, especially in a non-working environment where demands are not made. The best way to bond with a horse is simply to hang out together and have fun getting to know each other. A horse will bond when it can sense unconditional love. ... Just as horses will bond only with those they know.

·         Horse totems are associated with the element of air and of swift movement. Get in touch with that energy by visualizing a horse galloping across the horizon with its manes flowing freely.

·         A horse totem is a strong spirit and its magical properties are one of the most influential of all animal totems. Strength, friendship, virtue, cooperation, adventure, movement, freedom..and so much more..  

·         Horses represent a guide to overcoming obstacle. Horse people are wild spirits and their spirit cannot be broken.  

·         A horse teaches that power cannot be attained by force, but rather it is given to him who is willing to accept responsibility in a respectful manner.

·         The horse totem indicates travel and new journeys and directions in life.

·         Horses are said to be able to sense those with magical powers and can see good or evil in people. They will also warn humans from danger.

·         Horses are very intelligent animals and are sensitive to a multitude of human emotions from happiness to anger and they respond to these emotions in various ways.

·         A horse shows both earthy strength and unearthly powers. It is regarded highly throughout the world and connected with the magical powers of shamans.

·         The power of the horse is the wisdom to remember all steps in one’s life and to learn from them. This includes experiences from a previous life.

·         To watch a horse in the wild is truly an experience of its majesty, its grace and its magnetism.

·         Real power is strength used with wisdom. This requires love, compassion, and the willingness to share ones achievements and insights with others. It’s important to deny our ego to have access to this power. The horse spirit is power through awareness. A horse brings strength and force into the energy field of the person, which gives them the freedom to journey to far places.

·         One who has the power of the horse will see enhanced insight and intuition, a better sense of self control allowing one the ability to use strong self confidence to move in new directions.

·         The color of the horse is also steeped with symbolic meanings:

white horses: light, sun, day, vitality, illumination, resurrection, messenger of birth

This information i have found on this website

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Journey, how to defeat fear

While catching up with the Visual Quest Facebook group and all the other course material, i came across this parable. Some people on Visual Quest have done 'journeys' already, guided by Pixie Campbel. Some came across some dominant and aggressive animals that tried to give them a message. Pixie's advise on this is: trying to 'be' with them instead of running from them might make us understand what they try to tell us. Because it's difficult to 'get' what these intense animals try to tell us if we feel resistance towards their 'style' of communicating with us. That message from animals is what is called 'animal medicine' in shamanic 'language'. I am so happy to learn all this..

This parable sheds a different light on facing fear. It gave me Goosebumps..

Once there was a young warrior. Her teacher told her that she had to do battle with fear. She didn’t want to do that. It seemed too aggressive; it was scary; it seemed unfriendly. But the teacher said she had to do it and gave her the instructions for the battle. The day arrived. The student warrior stood on one side, and fear stood on the other. The warrior was feeling very small, and fear was looking big and wrathful. They both had their weapons. The young warrior roused herself and went toward fear, prostrated three times, and asked, "May I have permission to go into battle with you?" Fear said, "Thank you for showing me so much respect that you ask permission." Then the young warrior said, "How can I defeat you?" Fear replied, "My weapons are that I talk fast, and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved, and you do whatever I say. If you don’t do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me, and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. But if you don’t do what I say, I have no power." In that way, the student warrior learned how to defeat fear. 

~Pema Chödrön

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Wolf encounter

There is something on my mind for the past week or so. Wolves! There are a few reasons why I think so much of a particular wolf.  I have never researched animal totems before, but now that I think about wolves so much I think I ought to. I have had an encounter with a wolf when I was a little girl. Since then I feel strongly attracted to wolves. This encounter I had must have been strongly guided by a spiritual connection, or astral or whatever you call these kinds of connections. The Dutch news was all about a peculiar finding for Dutch standards. Last week a dead wolf was found on the highway somewhere in the eastern part of Holland. Wolves have not been found in Holland for decades. They don’t know why the wolf was there and if that means wolves are back in Holland.

To me it feels I keep getting ‘wolf’ signs from everywhere around me. And that makes me want to explore the symbolic nature of wolves and also I feel a strong urge to share my wolf encounter and finally write it down. I have not told this to many people in my life, but this encounter has always been a big part of me.  I am now ready to find out what ‘wolf-energy’ tries to tell me.

I think I was about 7 years old, it was stone cold outside and everything was covered in snow. We, my parents, my sister and myself were visiting my family in eastern Europe. Both my parents come from Slovakia, in the most eastern part of it, near the border with Ukraine.  Wolves live there in the mountains and occasionally there have been seen some hungry wolves during wintertime. They had come looking for food. Killing the chickens and other small farm animals did not make them very popular with humans over there.  And according to my aunt who one morning told us a fascinating wolf story, there hadn’t been seen any in or around the village for almost two decades. I somehow was so very fascinated by this story that something in me got incredibly determined to find a wolf  THAT morning. I told every grown up in that room I was going to go outside with my 7 year old buddy to find a wolf. Everyone laughed at me and waved their hand and said, oh yes you little silly girl, go and find that wolf honey.  I summoned (literally) my friend (a little boy) to come with me to help me find it. We went on our way, up the street, to the ‘last’ cemetery of the village. After that cemetery the village stopped and the mountains started. My aunt had told me that’s where they come from when they are hungry so  it seemed like the best place to look.  Soon after we walked up, I spotted a tail, behind some low bushes in front of us, I thought to myself it probably a dog, but thought let’s scare the boy who was with me. So I screamed, there a WOLF, a WOLF! He almost got so scared he pissed his pants and wanted to run away. So I quickly changed my story and said it was a joke, that it must be only a dog. But as we did not get to see more of her then her tail, I wasn’t completely sure it was a dog. But I kept silent to keep my mate with me. 

My heart was wildly jumping in my chest from that moment on, but the search was ON. So we bravely walked up to the cemetery at the foot of the mountain.  White snow was everywhere like some fairytale land, and there at the entrance of the cemetery we found blood, and not just a little bit but a whole trail of them. Well how scary can it get for two 7 year olds? By that time we felt like we must be staring in a movie. Our search had become a sacred quest for a wolf. Frightened as we were we decided to go on and follow the blood trail. It took us to a high point on the cemetery, from there it went down the hills.  We could overlook the valley where the farmhouses were.  We could hear the farm animals make extreme noises, it sounded like they were panicking . We spotted the blood trail went down the hill. 

We went downhill with it and arrived in a forest area. Suddenly two skiing individuals approached from the other side, the side to where the drops were leading. The two people looked a bit wondered finding two little kids in the woods by themselves, but left us going our way.  I thought the wolf, who we thought we had seen while standing up that hill looking at the farmhouses, can’t have gone along this way or it had to meet with these skiing folks. They did not seem like having an encounter with a wolf, so I thought I must had been wrong and it must had been a dog after all. But as the blood trail went our way to the village we kept on following it just in case. Suddenly we came to a small open space in the woods, and there she was....our wolf! She was lying in a pool of red blood.....asleep or dead we couldn’t tell. 

We were exhilarated...ran back to the village and alarmed everyone. But no one seemed to care...they did not believe two 7 year old kids who went on a wolf search that morning only to come back after actually finding one.  We kept on shouting on the top of our lungs that we REALLY had found a wolf!!! And that she appeared wounded and maybe dead. Finally some adults decided to come with us to check out our story.  We took them to the place where we found her, and when we arrived she had really died...Apparently she was shot by a hunter in the mountains, and she walked down to the village looking for a quiet place to die. As I touched her dead body she was so incredibly powerful and beautiful... I never forgot her.

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