Psychospiritual Growth: Homa for the commons

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Psychospiritual growth is not an isolated and individual process. It happens as we are embedded in the ecosystem of the Earth.

Vandana Shiva, an Indian activist advocating for an ecological civilization, advocates for organic farming and the food chain. She participated in the creation of the “Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth,” a manifesto to underscore the interconnectedness of all beings. She says that all beings have a right to life, and commons, the resources we share like food, air, and water, should not be poisoned or polluted. Disruption of the quality of the commons affect the sustainable exchanges among living systems. We are depleted by poisoned commons—and that includes human knowledge.

Vandana Shiva

I’m highlighting Shiva’s work because I find connection with it as part of the emergent planetary culture, the movement toward conscious lifestyles and consideration of all living systems on the planet. There are others, too—think tanks, activists, and visionaries—who are creating the spaces and action around an ecological civilization, one that moves toward a symbiosis that supports all beings and systems on Earth.

Human knowledge is part of the commons. We share the resource of thoughts. What our minds consume influences what our bodies and states consume. Traditional and social media deplete our psychic energetic reserves when overconsumed. Mental imagery and the ability to think beyond ourselves can be distorted. There’s no easy way to participate in an ecological civilization without doing inner work—this is the entry point for self care into the conversation. Planetary culture acknowledges our psychological health and behavior mitigates our consumption of natural resources.

Homa, the fire ceremony that I offer on a regular basis, clears subtle energies across dimensions. There have been studies done on the effect of homa on farming. Homa also works to clear the psychic plane, too, although those effects are harder to measure. Individuals have conveyed a mental clarity, a lightness in the mind perceived after sitting for homa. Homa is a link between self care, mental wellbeing, and our ability to make the perspective shifts and behavior changes that support action in line with planetary culture. This is why I offer homa through online and real-time ceremonies on a regular basis.

Homa fire in a kund

The Bhagavad Gita, Hindu scripture, says that all beings depend on food. We feed the fire our thoughts with offerings of cow dung, ghee, rice, and herbs. The dung and ghee are from cows, who eat grass, which grows in the soil, which is fed by rain and wind that moves clouds through the air—analogous to the regenerative cycle of life, and how each part has a place in it. The offerings are a yagya: an oblation, service, a purification, in which the offering of material on the mental plane becomes a selfless act to the fire. The fire, in a spiritual sense, the core of consciousness. Fire is the infinite divine energy.

Consider how you can gaze upon a tree and find beauty in that form of nature. Similarly, we can gaze upon the fire and allow an encounter with the divine—the light of the flame in the fire is the light of divinity within us. It is the impulse for a transpersonal connection, the feeling of a relationship to beings beyond ourselves. So, by working on the individual level, we are supporting the work to clear the mental plane, purify the commons of human knowledge, find rejuvenation in infinite divine energy, and through those connections, cultivate a relationship to society and planet that honors the interconnectedness of all beings.

Idam na mama * For the greater good of all

***

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who would like to work with me on your journey of psychospiritual growth or integrating transpersonal psychology with your client practice, go here 
  • If you are a GenXer who wants to learn about a transpersonal worldview and write your own story in a group setting online, go here
  • If you are interested in my work with language and changing the mental healthcare narrative through transpersonal psychology, I invite you to read the curated pieces from my portfolio that are on this website and reach out

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world.
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences. 

Psychospiritual Growth: Climate change and mental well-being

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Psychospiritual growth is not an isolated thing. The world we exist in affects our ability to grow.

A dynamic circuit exists between the inner world and outer worlds; identity and modern political consciousness; human activity and Earth systems. Here are some thoughts that I hope encourage reflection on your place in the circuitry–specifically, how climate change is messing with our heads. Literally.

There is a strong relationship between mental well-being and the instability of the world’s weather patterns. Climate change, which is at the root of severe weather (such as the hurricane superstorms), undermines our fundamental stability in our place- or location-based lifestyles. When people are displaced by environmental catastrophes, they are done so in an often haphazard manner. They seek initial shelter in temporary structures as they consider the permanent structures that they must return to/rebuild, or vacate. And the place to which they return, is changed. The people’s association with the place is changed. Climate change doesn’t let our minds rest.

In India, monsoons appear in ancient Sanskrit poetry and Bollywood films. In other words, the monsoon season is part of life and culture in India. Monsoon season governs what people eat because it is part of the cycle of crop cultivation. Infrastructure has been built to handle predictable amounts of rain. But in the past few years, the climate is changing; significant downpours happen during monsoon season and droughts happen outside of the season. The unpredictability of the rain affects food supplies, economies, and the way and quality of life.

In New Orleans, Louisiana, Hurricane Katrina wiped out entire neighborhoods in 2005. The city then changed rapidly through climate gentrification, which happens when people with more monetary means leave areas of climate risk and catalyze a demographic shift through rising property value in areas less at risk of extreme weather. Individuals (often Black people) who grew up in recently gentrified neighborhoods are being treated as outsiders by the new arrivals—often white people.

Glenn Albrecht, an Australian environmental activist, acknowledges the psychological experience of pain when “the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault.” Albrecht calls it “solastalgia.” The term applies to situations of climate change, environmental destruction, and ecological imbalance. It is a reflection that our human psyche is touched by a relationship with Earth, that we yearn for a healthy balance with habitat, that part of our human condition is driven by an  “ecological unconscious.”

Consider India, New Orleans, and many places where people live while forces greater than them alter their community landscape.

It is devastating to see that the effects of governments across the globe respond with splintered actions (some mitigating climate science, prioritizing industry and resource consumption, and establishing short-term policies that don’t have long-term goals and live-ability in mind; others acknowledging the enmeshment of human civilization and Earth’s systems). The resulting destabilization of a place-based lifestyle, if that place falls in a high risk zone for the effects of climate change, leaves people hypervigilant. Having an emergency plan, that is, evacuation procedures and resource contingencies, as a fact of life puts us in the mental space in which we are always on edge.

And, consider the place might not be there to return to at all.

***

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who would like to work with me on your journey of psychospiritual growth or integrating transpersonal psychology with your client practice, go here 
  • If you are a GenXer who wants to learn about a transpersonal worldview and write your own story in a group setting online, go here
  • If you are interested in my work with language and changing the mental healthcare narrative through transpersonal psychology, I invite you to read the curated pieces from my portfolio that are on this website and reach out

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world.
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences. 

Psychospiritual Growth: Growing Through Fire

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Me with post homa glow in Joshua Tree

Psychospiritual growth builds heat.

As I soon as I got out of my truck and stood for the first time in Joshua Tree village, a small town in southern California where the Sonoran and Mojave deserts meet, I couldn’t tell where I stopped and the dry warm air and dusty Earth started.  It felt like the fire inside that had propelled me west all summer had fully engulfed my being. I was in my element.

As I look back over my trajectory from upstate New York to Los Angeles in the summer of 2018, I see how the sparks became this blaze.

They started before I left Kingston, New York, a place in the lush, green, earthy Hudson Valley near the Catskill Mountains. I had been laying on the makeshift mattress on the floor. Everything in my two-bedroom space I had been living in had been packed. It was early in the morning on my second-to-last day there. I remember relishing the way the sun entered the windows in my bedroom, moved through a teardrop-shaped crystal, cast rainbows aka colorful kisses on the walls, a pile of bags, my toes. The morning gazing ritual was something that I loved to do every day, especially when reflecting on my own inner space.

“Who am I?”

That morning, I wondered if I could trust myself. The impulse to go west was strong. In the space of the apartment that was nearly empty, I felt full. The calling was my ethereal guide and I felt kinship with the sun, the sweet energy, the strong light.

I had packed my homa fire ceremony kit, and as I laid there considering the dates I had booked to offer public ceremonies, I recognized that I was nervous at the thought of bringing it across the country. It would be my first time practicing homa in groups beyond New York. Homa is a Vedic fire ceremony for peace. It is cleansing. It is healing across dimensions. Homa involves chanting Sanskrit as ghee (clarified butter) is offered to a small fire that is created in a copper container. I wondered, too, if my teacher Ma Bha (Ma Bhaskarananda), whom I met by going to Ananda Ashram in Monroe, New York (about an hour south from where I lived), would ever know just how much my life had changed by doing the ceremony that I had learned from her years ago.

I eventually got up off the floor and started on my departure to-do list. It was mid-morning when I received an unexpected message from Ma Bha’s son. (Her son happened to be my friend and lived on the street parallel to mine in Kingston. We knew each other for years before realizing the connection.) He said he had a few things for me. I was confused because I didn’t know what he would be bringing, let alone if it would fit in my truck, but I agreed to receive gifts. Later that night, he arrived with an entire bag of Ma Bha’s belongings, including a bag that she used when she went on her own pilgrimage to India. I was moved beyond words. That’s the moment I realized how deeply I had connected to the fire and to my teacher, who showed up in this amazing synchronicity. It was then I knew this road trip would be blessed, and that my intuition to go was aligned with a higher purpose.

The relationship that I have with fire (through the sun and actual thing and also through the creative process and metaphorical thing) is one of the most important relationships I have in my life. I often say at some point during a fire ceremony—“the light that you see in the flame is you, it is your inner light, it is your teacher”—because Ma Bha taught those words to me.

Ma Bha at Ananda Ashram

Personal growth and the experience of inner space is so subjective. But fire is part of it: a real fire can be the objective spark that sets the subjective inner light a-flame.

I carefully selected some places to stay on my journey west that would give me opportunities to share fire. I booked a week in Albuquerque, New Mexico to complete a seminar at the Ayurvedic Institute turned into a month-long stop.

Ma Bha had spent years there teaching alongside Dr. Vasant Lad, whose direction, teaching, and kindness has helped make the Ayurvedic Institute an authoritative place of Ayurvedic knowledge exchange in the West. Ayurveda offers a holistic frame for the material world, where everything interacts in a series of balance, imbalance, and exchanges. Homa is part of an ideal Ayurvedic self care routine. Each time I mentioned that I too had studied with Ma Bha in New York, I was met with exclaims of respect and joy at the Institute. I sat for several fire ceremonies while I was in Albuquerque, and I performed my first online broadcast of one. My hand shook as I lit the ceremonial fire in the kitchen of the apartment I had rented. I was nervous. I wondered if it would “work” over the Internet.

But, my friend fire showed up. The people who were at the online ceremony (physically across the country) felt the benefits, and told me afterward it was as if we were sitting together. The validation that I needed from my teacher, who was out of body, arrived. And the fact that fire works across time and space was confirmed.

This simple, enriching ceremony gave (and gives) me the ability to feel the fire inside and use it to create connection to others. To invoke the teachers we all have inside. To let us be able to hear the intuition and follow that compass to things that set us a-light.

I hesitate to use the word “pilgrimage” although it is indeed what the road trip became. It was a pilgrimage with a vague destination. As I drove, I kept referring to the time as “a blessed summer.”  I just knew I had to do it. I just knew that I didn’t want to leave the question of “Who am I?” unanswered. Fire would help me answer that. “Why go west?” was what I needed to find out.

I made it to Los Angeles, where I connected with a teacher who catalyzed profound changed in me. I was as far west as I could go on the continent. And while the healing I received was intense, I knew Los Angeles wasn’t my final destination. So I turned around. I stayed a few nights in the low desert in Palm Springs, and an electricity started to flow through me. I wondered if that was it. I knew that many people spend time in the area around Joshua Tree in the high desert an hour away. There was something about the desert landscape that felt welcoming to me, and I knew people have profound experiences within themselves while on the land. I took a chance and rented a small casita on the highway in Joshua Tree. It was a tiny building in a tiny cluster of buildings that was the tiny town. As soon as I arrived there, a lightning bolt shot through me–metaphorically. A surge of energy. An excitement for the land and for the relationship that I would cultivate with my inner and outer fire. Intuition struck me with a confirmation that I had arrived to my final destination of what I now call my spiritual home.

Homa at sunrise in Joshua Tree

Homa ceremony with a friend at sunrise in Joshua Tree

The heat of the desert ignited the heat in me. The Earth, through fire, had called me home. All I had to do was show up and listen. I received a deeply renewed connection to Self. I was part of something greater. And there was great personal power within me.

Inner work sets the inner fire a-light and sparks inner transformation that is profound. Knowing that I had asked, “Who am I?” and then following the intuition to go west to a place that would nurture healing, growth, and transformation that would unleash that power is one of my proudest moments. Doubt and uncertainty was replaced with confidence and affirmation.

Here’s a poem I wrote one morning as I laid on a bed in a furnished house I rented in Joshua Tree on the first morning there:

The sun woke me up today; the rays were like a friend’s skilled hand, a presence with familiarity, playing some celestial rhythm; and in the music: light waves moving through the space, dancing on my eyelids, encouraging me to open them, inviting me to another day of life n’ play… // and then I went outside. // Let’s see what happens.

***

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who would like to work with me on your journey of psychospiritual growth or integrating transpersonal psychology with your client practice, go here 
  • If you are a GenXer who wants to learn about a transpersonal worldview and write your own story in a group setting online, go here
  • If you are interested in my work with language and changing the mental healthcare narrative through transpersonal psychology, I invite you to read the curated pieces from my portfolio that are on this website and reach out

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world.
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences.