Sandra Ingerman – Shamanic Wisdom
The preparation work from me is the most important and what I mean by preparation work isn’t just finding a place to do your ceremony indoors or outdoors and creating altars and sacred tools and spaces to bring power into the work that you’re doing, but it’s so important. This is so true in the West. We bring our rational minds with us into a ceremony, so the most important part of the preparation work for me is having people dance and sing, and spend time in silence and meditation, and stepping out of their Egoic selves, so it’s their heart, their spirit-self, their divine-self that’s actually stepping into the ceremony, instead of our ego of just I want, I want, I want. It’s really important to put our rational mind aside, our ordinary day aside because I watch people just jump from work into performing a ceremony, but you can see there’s no power in it.
There wasn’t that preparation work of how we take the time to dress, and to pray, and to create altars around us, and light beautiful candles, and put out flowers. It really makes a very big difference. So, I would say that setting intention and preparation work are the most important parts of the ceremony. Once a ceremony starts, it takes on a life of its own. If you do the right preparation and everything is perfect, you don’t have to worry about if it starts raining in the middle of a ceremony, or somebody starts crying in the middle of a ceremony because their sacred space is holding everything and everything that happens in a ceremony is perfect.
In shamanic cultures, instead of people going, “Oh, I think something went wrong in the ceremony,” they’ll laugh about what happened in a ceremony and say, “wasn’t that a beautiful ceremony.” They know that once you’ve done the preparation work, and once you start from being your divine self and connecting to the unseen realms and to the divine without, that everything that happens next is absolutely perfect.
Sandie Sedgbeer – Why is it so important to do it at the right time? We hear that if you want to set an intention for your future, you need to do it in this phase of the moon. Why does that make a difference?
Sandra Ingerman – I do ceremonies whenever, so I’m a rebel? I don’t follow any rules, but I think that what’s important to understand is that we are ruled by the cycles of nature, so when the new moon comes out, all of life, every being – not just you – all of life is starting a new cycle and so if you want to bless something? What a great time – there’s a new cycle starting or the full moon.
We know the power of the full moon. We know what happens to people and their moods on the full moon. The full moon has exponential energy, so when a lot of power needs to come into a ceremony, often, we will do it on a full moon.
And then we’re moving into the solstice, and we want to honor the changes in cycles because everything in nature is changing in summer, fall, winter, and spring, and we are changing too because we are not just connected to nature, we are nature, So when we perform ceremonies on the Solstice and Equinox, what we are doing is we are actually harmonizing with the cycle of nature and the changes that are happening on the land where you live. What that does is it puts you in flow with the River of Life, so you are starting to live in accordance with the flow that happens at the change of times of the year, instead of going against the River of Life, which is what many of us do, It helps us to harmonize with nature cycles.
Sandie Sedgbeer – In The Book of Ceremony, you write about the exponential power of working in a group, saying that when everyone in a group or community works together at the invisible level first, the result can lead to a powerful transformational change to create a healthier world. Given the rising levels of violence, fear, and destruction occurring in the world today, your offer to harness the collective field of energy that we’re creating right now with our listeners is absolutely perfect for the live, guided ceremony so. Thank you for offering to do that for us.
Sandra Ingerman – When we perform a ceremony we step into such an ancient collective because ceremonies have been performed for thousands of years with the support of the Earth, which is 4.6 billion years old, and all the elements which are so ancient and so there’s so much that we can join into a collective that’s been working for tens of thousands of years outside of time and we step into new frequency and a new vibration of life where we can travel back and forth between the dimensions of the unseen realms. What happens is we build bridges, so healing energies can flood our current collective.
Editor’s Note: To participate with Sandra Ingerman’s Guided Ceremony, it begins right after the first break, about the 20-minute mark, of What Is Going OM, Interview of Sandra Ingerman – Shamanic Wisdom
Sandie Sedgbeer – Could you give us an example of a ceremony that could be adapted for different purposes, maybe releasing an old wound or healing toxic energy?
Sandra Ingerman – The ceremony that we just did you can do by yourself, but you can also bring it into your community, and you can do it as guided visualization, or you could build a small fire. You know, depending on fire conditions. You can have sticks present at the fire and you can ask everybody to blow a pain into the stick instead of a blessing and have each person come up to the fire with the whole support of the community and put a stick into the fire to release a pain into the fire or a prayer for the community into the fire.
Another classic way to work is with a prayer tree. Prayer trees or blessing trees were used all over the world. A tree that volunteered itself was blessed with offerings of food or sacred herbs, and then you can tie a ribbon or a piece of yarn – really loosely because branches continue to grow – and you can ask for to be released from a pain or an illness, or you can ask for a blessing for a good life, a new job, a blessing for the planet, or a blessing for your family.
So those are two ceremonies that I share a lot. Many people bring really simple fire ceremonies into their communities, where everybody comes together and releases something together or prays for something together, and you can only imagine the bonding that happens and how that strengthens the community, but you can also do it for yourself, and you can always do these ceremonies alone, too.
Sandie Sedgbeer – A lot of people like to write down their intentions at specific times of power throughout the year. One of the things that. Made me my ears prick up when I was reading your book when you talked about dissolving paper, which sounds to me like the most fabulous idea.
Sandra Ingerman – Dissolving paper is amazing, and you can get it from sciencebob.com, which sells children’s science supplies for school. What happened for me, and a lot of the people who I trained in ceremonial work, is that there are many places on the planet right now where we can’t do fire ceremonies outside because of the fire danger.
Dissolving paper is paper that was created to be ecologically correct with no pollutants in it. You fill a bowl with warm water, cold water won’t work, and you write down whatever intention you want. I was doing it every day for a while when I was dealing with an illness that I wanted to be released from, and you put the paper into the water, and it literally dissolves completely. So, your pain dissolves right in front of your eyes, or what you’re praying for it dissolves right in front of your eyes, and then you go out and gift it to the Earth.
It’s another form of working, and it’s a very feminine form of working. It’s a beautiful ceremony with sitting by a bowl of water and putting in your intention in, watching it disappear, and then bringing it outside and feeding it to the Earth, so that the creative power of the Universe can make your intentions so.
Continue to Page 3 of the Interview with Sandra Ingerman
