Hank Wesselman, P.h.D.

The Sacred Garden--
Your personal place of Power and Healing

Our last several columns have been focused upon the multi-dimensional nature of the self, the multi-leveled nature of reality, and how the two intersect to become one, allowing the shaman, the inspired visionary found in all cultures, including the West, to experience the numinous realms of the spiritual worlds.

The ability to travel, like the shaman, between the different levels of reality is known in the Western world as shamanic journeywork. This is an ancient technique that was pioneered by our stone-age precursors, and it is the ancestor of today's guided visualizations, hypnotherapies, and guided imagery therapies, in which a therapist is verbally directing you through the experience by suggesting where to go or what to see or do.

Shamanic journeywork is different, however, in that you are in control of the process from start to finish, creating your own objectives at the beginning--your own goals for the journey--then allowing the vision to unfold on its own, providing you with information that you are perceiving, yet not creating.

When that portal located within the body soul opens, supported by the vibration of the rattle or the drum, it becomes possible to venture into the inner worlds as a visionary explorer. In doing so, you are engaging in an ancient human experience--the ability to vision. And once your body soul has been conditioned to do this, you may be simply stunned at the elegant simplicity, as well of the power, of this time-tested method.

As I mentioned in The Journey to the Sacred Garden (which includes a CD of recorded drumming and rattling,) there are different ways of perceiving. Some of us don't get those big time visuals while in journey mode. Some receive information through the auditory channel and we may hear a voice or a sound, perhaps a 'tone-poem' of beautiful, tranquil music, in which information suddenly becomes available to us.

Others are somatic in the way they access--we just know things, as though the information is coming to us through our body. Many psychics and clairsentients fall into this category, feeling and sensing their journeys, rather than seeing them. Such inner travelers may tap into a pervading sense of tranquility or peacefulness, and while in this state, they may simply receive information in response to their need to know.

The keyword is trust—trust that you are perceiving something that is real, something that is separate from yourself, something that you are not making up. Remember, it is the body soul perceives, but it is not creative. It is incapable of making anything up. It can only tell you what it has seen and what it remembers.

The initial goal for the participants and initiates who attend our experiential workshops is to find connection with their spirit helpers and teachers, and this becomes much easier once they have found their inner place of power and healing.

You might think of this place as your “Sacred Garden,” and most often, this is a locality that is already known to you--a place that exists in the same level that you go into in your dreaming at night when asleep.

In shamanic journeywork, however, we “spiritwalk” into these inner worlds while very much awake, which means that we, as shamanic practitioners, become activist dreamers (as well as dreamer-activists.) And it is here that we find something truly wondrous.

As we begin to experiment with shamanic journeying, we discover that we are actually following the “dream trails” traveled by our ancestors before us, many of whom may have been great shamans.

In revealing this fact to you, the reader, let me put in once again that if we go far enough back, all of us, even today’s non-tribal Westerners, are descended from indigenous peoples from somewhere, somewhen. This is an absolute given! And they all had shamans.

The Sacred Garden

All of us have fond memories of places we have been in life, settings where we have felt complete, at peace, and at ease. Often these are localities in nature with which we feel a strong sense of connection. In our meditations or in our daydreaming, we often spontaneously revisit such places by simply remembering them and by recalling what it was like to be there.

Remember—everything that exists here in our physical world has a dream aspect in the spirit world. Our feelings for those localities here activate our aka connections to the spiritual aspects of those places there. Shamanic journeywork allows us to intentionally travel along these aka cords (in the energetic field of Level Two) and enter into the "dreaming" of such places so that we may utilize them as "sacred gardens" where various tasks may then be accomplished.

Your garden might be a locality in the everyday world that you already know and love, a place you like to go camping or walking, or even your own backyard. It can also be a purely imaginal place that you create for yourself, one that you can simply dream into existence by using your creative imagination. Many of us did this spontaneously as children, creating an inner place that sustained and nurtured us much like Dorothy’s Oz, Peter Pan’s Neverland, or Alice’s Wonderland.

As your inner explorations bring your “spirit garden” into increasingly sharper focus, you will discover, as have countless others before you, that it operates by four primary rules.

1)      Everything in your sacred garden is symbolic of some aspect of you or your life experience.
--When you are in your garden, you are on the Third Level of reality, awareness and experience--the level of archetypes.

2)      Everything in your garden can be communicated with, enhancing your understanding of both yourself and your life experiences.
--Among the indigenous peoples, this is called divination. It means that you can talk with all the elements that make up your garden, and with practice you will understand what they have to say, but you must learn how to listen.

3)      Everything in the garden can be changed.
--You can make it just the way you want it to be by doing “gardenwork,” and…

4)      When you change your garden, some aspect of you or your life experience will shift in response.
--This is true magic.

We will talk about how to do this in our next column, and we will continue our explorations of this inner place of power and healing in our monthly columns to come, drawing upon some of the experiences recorded in the small book (with CD for journeywork) The Journey to the Sacred Garden, as well as some new ones.

Until that time, allow me to invoke the spirit of my great Hawaiian friend, Kahu Hale Makua, and extend to each of you the Light and the Love of the Ancestors, The Source of Life, rejoicing in the Power and the Peace, braided with the cords of Patience, revealing the tapestry of the strongest force in the Universe, your Aloha.

--with warm thoughts--Dr Hank

Encounters on
the Shaman's Path
with anthropologist Dr. Hank Wesselman, PhD.

by Dr.Hank Wesselman, P.h.D.

The Sacred Garden as a Place of Power

In our previous column, we explored the idea that each of us may find a personal place of power and healing in the spiritual worlds—a place that may become our “sacred garden.” This locality, once found, allows many things to come into being in our lives, in both the inner and outer levels of our existence.

Shamanic journeywork allows us to intentionally enter into the "dreaming" of this place… and since our inner and outer lives come to reflect each other, the garden can become the place of manifestation. This is applied shamanism at its absolute best.

In review (from last month’s column), our inner explorations of our sacred garden reveal that it operates by four rules.

--Everything in your garden is symbolic of some aspect of ourselves or our life experience.

--Everything in the garden can be communicated with, enhancing understanding.

--Everything in the garden can be changed, which means that we can make it just the way we want it to be, and…

--When we change our garden, some aspect of us, or our life experience, will shift in response.

The garden can become an inner place where we may go to restore ourselves—a personal getaway in the other world--and it may also serve as a locality where we may invite our spirit helpers, our guides, our ancestors, as well as our spirit teachers to meet with us from time to time to accomplish various things.

The more power we have, the easier this is to do, and the garden is a place where we may connect with power--big time.

We have discussed the concept of power in previous columns (see the archives.) The indigenous peoples know that this power is highly dispersed throughout the universe—it is everywhere and in everything. They understand, as well, that power can be densely concentrated in certain places and objects, and that it infuses and animates all living beings with life force.

Accordingly, shamans and medicine people pay particular attention in learning how to maintain and increase their personal supply of power because the effectiveness of all their practices is dependent on its presence as well as its "density."

The traditional peoples know that this power is real and that it may be harnessed for positive or negative purposes, depending on the intentions of the one who can accumulate, manipulate, and focus it.

They also know that anyone can learn how to connect with “the force”, and through practice, each of us can learn how to use it to manifest something--like healing, for example.

But before you use your sacred garden as a place of healing, it would be wise to build up your personal supply of power. This can be accomplished by doing a breathing exercise accompanied by an intention, a physical stimulus, and a visualization.

A Hawaiian exercise for self-empowerment in the garden:

Begin the exercise by closing your eyes, achieving stillness, and going to your sacred garden. Allow your conscious awareness to refocus itself there. You may use the drumming and rattling CD that accompanies my small book The Journey to the Sacred Garden to assist you in doing so.

When you arrive, allow yourself to settle, and as you do, let your focused awareness drift around your garden to see if anything has changed since your previous visit. We learn through direct experience that the garden is alive, and because of this, it can change itself spontaneously. In time we also discover that there is a very powerful spirit who lives in our garden…

Your egoic mental soul is the source of your intentionality, so while perceiving yourself sitting or standing in your garden, begin the exercise by using this self-aspect to create a strongly focused intention—to connect with power and take on a supercharge of energy.

Then, while holding that intention, gently shift your focus to your breathing. Breathe slowly in to the count of four, and then breathe slowly out to another four count, completely filling and emptying your lungs with each breath.

While deep breathing, select a subtle physical stimulus that you can do any time, any place, like folding your thumb into your fist and squeezing it gently. Your body soul is highly impressed by anything physical and this small act will alert it that you mean business. It will also cue the body soul to start pulling in energy with each breath (the intention), and since this soul-aspect is the interface between you and ‘the force,’ having it's full cooperation in powering up is essential.

Finally, the visualization: As you breathe slowly in, focus your awareness on the top of your head and visualize the power streaming in as a beam of light from your oversoul, your immortal spiritual aspect. Then, as you breathe out, shift your focus slowly down through your body to your midsection and visualize the power descending through your head, neck, and chest, coming to rest within your third chakra located behind and slightly above your navel.

Continue this cycle of deep breathing for four to eight breaths, and with each, visualize drawing the power in through your head with the in-breath, and then gather it behind your navel as you breathe out. The slow shift of focus from your head to your navel is what does it. With each completed breath, see the light in your third chakra, your power center, grow brighter. Be alert for any physical sensations in your body indicating power augmentation.

With practice, you can do this exercise anywhere and at any time, whenever there is need.

Once you become power-filled, use your mental soul to create a thoughtform in your garden of something that you strongly desire to acquire or experience in your everyday reality. This is the first step to manifesting that something into your life. Remember the fourth rule--when you alter your garden, subtracting or adding something to that place of power, some aspect of you or your life will shift in response.

When you create something (or someone) in your garden and pay close attention to it (them) every time you go there, your focused concentration will cause energy to flow into the thoughtform. Energy flows where your attention goes, and with repetition, a strong energetic field will take form within and around the thoughtform--a field whose density will increase until it has the power to act as an energetic magnet that may attract the nearest available equivalent experience toward you in your outer life.

Remember--the more energy you have, the more you can accomplish. Knowing this, you can create a shift in your physical, mental, or emotional health, for example, producing a miraculous healing from a supposedly incurable illness. We will examine this process in more depth in the monthly columns to come.

As many have observed, if you want something strongly enough, you will probably get it—so be careful what you ask for. The key is no doubt. As the kahuna nui Hale Makua was fond of saying “If you doubt, you’re out!”

The discovery that we can do gardenwork, changing or altering our sacred garden to suit ourselves, has life-changing implications.

For starters, you might simply wish to enhance your sacred place with a bed of sunflowers or a circle of standing stones, a waterfall to sit beside or rainbows to delight the eye. Your mental soul can use its power of creative imagination to imagine them into existence in your garden, and they will be there from that moment forward.

To be in a place of great beauty is very uplifting and may be deeply restorative to all three levels of your being—physical, mental-emotional, and spiritual. And as we have observed, your garden, by its very existence, will serve you as a personal place of refuge from the trials and tribulations of your everyday existence.

Remember, the body soul takes everything literally. It does not distinguish between reality and illusion. Your body soul perceives your garden as real.

Conversely, you might find something in your garden that you don't want there. The first rule reveals that this something is symbolic of some aspect of you or your life, while the third rule states that you can change it or even remove it from your garden. If that something is symbolic of an illness, the fourth rule affirms that when you diminish it or remove its spiritual aspect from your garden, you can affect its energetic aspect and remove it from your physical body.

Remember, when you change the symbols, the archetypes, of your inner reality, something within you or your outer world will change in response. This is what all true magic really is.

Next month, we will begin to explore how the sacred garden may be used for healing work. Until then, allow me to invoke the spirit of my great Hawaiian friend, Kahu Hale Makua, and extend to each of you the Light and the Love of the Ancestors, The Source of Life, rejoicing in the Power and the Peace, braided with the cords of Patience, revealing the tapestry of the strongest force in the Universe, your Aloha.

--with warm thoughts--Dr Hank