{"id":20046,"date":"2019-06-01T01:10:03","date_gmt":"2019-06-01T06:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paganpages.org\/content\/?p=21455"},"modified":"2019-05-29T14:48:14","modified_gmt":"2019-05-29T19:48:14","slug":"human-being-or-human-doing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/2019\/06\/01\/human-being-or-human-doing\/","title":{"rendered":"Human BEing or Human DOing?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201c<\/strong>Reminder to everyone that \u2018your best\u2019 doesn\u2019t mean pushing yourself to your breaking point. \u2018Your best\u2019 means the best you can do while being the best you. Get enough sleep, give yourself breaks, listen to your limits. \u2018Your best is better when you\u2019re happy and healthy.\u201d<\/strong><\/em>
<\/strong>-author unknown<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the last article<\/a> for Pagan Pages Magazine, I wrote about the Maya Prophecy of the Fifth World and the new spiritual energy we have been living in since 2012 \u201cwhere we are being asked to raise our consciousness and step into a new kind of balance with the cosmos and the Earth.\u201d (Engr\u00e1cio, Pagan Pages, May 2019<\/a>) Recently, I\u2019ve noticed a fairly radical shift in my own spiritual journey that\u2019s impacting the way I live my life more positively. I\u2019ve been practicing slowing down to turtle pace and using this powerful prehistoric totem to guide me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\nmy life, my body has been one of the greatest teachers for how to\nlive in balance. Recently, it has been forcing me to pace myself\nafter a two-year period of autoimmune illness where I really didn\u2019t\nhave extra energy to burn. This meant that I had to become really\naware of how much energy I had at any given moment and choose wisely\nhow I spent that energy\u2013if at all. This had its challenges,\nhowever, I realized that for the first time in my life, I understood\nwhat was driving the autoimmune illnesses in my life. Author Oriah\nHouse (Mountain Dreamer) summarizes the belief system that I\ndiscovered feeds into autoimmune illness: \u201cI\nwas taught to \u2018go at\u2019 things. Studying, working, writing,\norganizing, yard work, house cleaning, sewing, reading, praying,\nfasting: You name it, in my childhood anything worth doing was worth\ndoing fast and going at it hard.\u201d In shamanic medicine sickness,\nillness and disease are present first in the spiritual realm before\nmanifesting in the physical body. So this means that the longer the\nimbalanced patterns are played out in the physical, more likelihood\nthat the body will begin to show signs of wear and tear until a more\nserious ailment takes hold. Thankfully, I listened to this last big\n\u201cknock\u201d and so my body didn\u2019t have to keep screaming at me in\norder for me to institute changes. The last two years, autoimmune\nillness gave me a gift of helping me to see everything I was missing\nby racing through life in order to accomplish goals and make my life\ncount: I was losing quality of life, which cannot be found in pushing\nquantity. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One\nof the spirit animals I\u2019ve worked with for about a decade now is a\nsea turtle. This wise ancient animal made it possible for me to keep\nup my physical exercise the last two years by shifting me into the\nelement of water. Every time I tried to work out on land, I was\nexhausted for days and spent hours sleeping to recover my energy. I\nnoticed that this didn\u2019t happen during my early morning swims. In\nfact, I gained energy and had no body pain after my aquatic sessions.\nEvery morning, I put my fins on and shapeshifted into a dolphin, a\nwhale, or a turtle with a prayer they would show me how to heal my\nbody; this strategy worked. I noticed how effortless, dreamy, fluid,\nand meditative my workouts became. Most of all, I was further honing\nthe law of putting in minimum effort to gain maximum efficiency; I\nwas learning to conserve energy by just putting the right amount into\ncompleting a task. Sometimes this called for creative solutions so I\ncould maintain integrity with what my body was telling me. For\nexample, if someone came into my swimming lane that swam faster than\nme, I didn\u2019t increase my speed to \u201ckeep up,\u201d but rather doubled\nback so I could keep swimming at my own pace while staying out of the\nfaster swimmers\u2019 way. I imagined the pain, tension, and illness in\nmy body being transmuted by the salt water and asked my spirit guides\nto cleanse those waters of anything that could harm others. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When\nI reflected back at how I was in my naturalness in my early\nchildhood, BEing was a state that I was in all the time. I knew this\nstate intimately. In fact, I sought out wholeness by going into\nnature for extended periods of time: watching ants march back and\nforth to their nests, timing how long it took a slug to make it from\none end of my garden to another, and watching tall cedars sway in the\nwind for hours. When I entered school, I started to feel like I was\nlosing control of my life and was often scolded for dreaming instead\nof DOing something productive. I started to conform and forget about\nthat BEing state that got me into so much trouble\u2013even though I\nknew intuitively how important it was to my feeling of well-being. I\nbecame so stressed out that by the time I was in grade four, I\nstarted losing my hair and was diagnosed with alopecia (an autoimmune\nillness). At that young age, I had already developed the pattern of\njust \u201cgoing at\u201d things hard until I crashed physically. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nAs\nan educator for twenty years, I love the message in the article\n\u201cLet\u2019s Stop Stealing Time from Our Children\u201d and have found it\nto be really wise advice that goes a long way towards valuing how\nchildren develop and what they need to be healthy: mind, body, heart,\nand spirit. We don’t have to worry that children won’t learn, we just\nhave to create conditions where they keep learning in healthy ways.\nCreating emotionally safe, developmentally appropriate environments\nwhere children have time to explore their inner worlds in natural\nspaces is essential if we are going to turn back the tide on this\nfrantic pace of living we\u2019ve created in our society. I\u2019ve watched\na worrying trend in education since I began teaching that puts a lot\nmore pressure on young children to perform academically in ways that\nthey simply are not developmentally and neurologically designed to\nachieve at those ages. For example, neuroscientists know that the\nhuman brain is not ready to engage in reading until around the ages\nof seven to ten years old. And yet, we have been creating curriculum\ngoals forcing teachers to ensure that preschoolers and primary aged\nchildren know how to read before they hit this neurological age\nbracket. Not surprisingly it\u2019s the kindergarten teachers who have\npushed back hardest against this policy: \u201c[T]hey were unanimous and\nunwavering [in advocating for] play time and rest.” I\u2019ve seen\nmore depressed and stressed primary aged children in recent years\nthan I used to see as a beginning teacher and that worries me. As I\nadvocate for the rights of children, I also find myself parenting my\nown inner child in gentler, kinder and more loving ways. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As\nan adult seeing these harmful patterns in a different light, I\nstarted to apply these turtle lessons in the pool to my land-based\nlife. I scrutinized everything I was putting my energy into and\nconsulted with my High Self in ceremony to see what was essential and\nwhat was not. I took action by cutting way<\/em> back on volunteer\nprojects, disengaging from relational conflicts that could not be\nresolved at present, and anything that didn\u2019t feed by passions. I\nstarted to bring into my world things I enjoyed doing that served no\npurpose except to bring me pleasure (i.e. knitting, sitting in my\ngarden with a cup of coffee watching the birds, playing ukulele,\nwatching films). I discovered that what Prentis Hemphill says is\nreally true and kind: \u201cBoundaries are the\ndistance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.\u201d\nSaying no to some things allowed me to say yes to myself and to my\nhealth. Although some folks might have been disappointed with some of\nmy decisions to remove my energy from certain situations, the higher\nperspective I received from Spirit assured me that life will go on\nwith or without my presence and this was a freeing thought. I hope I\nam becoming a role model by making the shift inside myself that\nchildren can see and emulate. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\ndon\u2019t know where this journey will lead me, but I do know that I\ncan no longer go back to measuring my success by how much I get done\nor produce. I am feeling so much better today after all the\nspiritual, mental, emotional, and physical healing work I\u2019ve done.\nAnd I have to say that I didn\u2019t do this alone; I enrolled the help\nof friends with a healing background to support me, I hired help to\nclean my house when I needed that, and I worked with medical\nprofessionals who have respect for spiritual practices. I am so\ngrateful for the whole journey and I am looking forward to the\nadventure my turtle is leading me on step by slow step. If you are\nfeeling burnt out, I encourage you to begin looking inside to see the\npatterns that need to change in your life. What will you give your\nenergy to? What will you stop giving your energy to? Who can you\nenroll to support the changes you need to make to come back to a\nstate of internal balance?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Resources: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

article: Living in the Fifth World Prophecy<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

article: Let\u2019s Stop Stealing Time from Our Children<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLeap\nof Faith\u201d art by Lucy Campbell<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

About\nthe Author:<\/strong>\n \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Jennifer\nEngr\u00e1cio<\/strong>\nhas been a student of shamanism since 2005. Jennifer is a certified\nteacher who has worked with children in many different education\nsettings since 2001. She is a certified shamanic coach, reiki master,\nand lomilomi practitioner; in addition, she runs Spiral Dance\nShamanics. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, she now lives in\nCalgary, Canada with her life partner. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engr\u00e1cio\nparticipated in self-publishing three books that are now available: \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe\nMagic Circle: Shamanic Ceremonies for the Child and the Child Within\u201d\n<\/em>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWomen\u2019s\nPower Stories: Honouring the Feminine Principle of Life\u201d <\/em>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDreaming\nof Cupcakes: A Food Addict\u2019s Shamanic Journey into Healing<\/a><\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more information go to: www.spiraldanceshamanics.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dreaming of Cupcakes: A Food Addict\u2019S Shamanic Journey into Healing on Amazon<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cReminder to everyone that \u2018your best\u2019 doesn\u2019t mean pushing yourself to your breaking point. \u2018Your best\u2019 means the best you can do while being the best you. Get enough sleep, give yourself breaks, listen to your limits. \u2018Your best is better when you\u2019re happy and healthy.\u201d -author unknown In the last article for Pagan Pages Magazine, I wrote about the Maya Prophecy of the Fifth World and the new spiritual energy we have been living in since 2012 \u201cwhere we are being asked to raise our consciousness and step into a new kind of balance with the cosmos and the Earth.\u201d (Engr\u00e1cio, Pagan Pages, May 2019) Recently, I\u2019ve noticed a fairly radical shift in my own spiritual journey that\u2019s impacting the way I live my life more positively. I\u2019ve been practicing slowing down to turtle pace and using this powerful prehistoric totem to guide me. In my life, my body has been one of the greatest teachers for how to live in balance. Recently, it has been forcing me to pace myself after a two-year period of autoimmune illness where I really didn\u2019t have extra energy to burn. This meant that I had to become really aware of how much energy I had at any given moment and choose wisely how I spent that energy\u2013if at all. This had its challenges, however, I realized that for the first time in my life, I understood what was driving the autoimmune illnesses in my life. Author Oriah House (Mountain Dreamer) summarizes the belief system that I discovered feeds into autoimmune illness: \u201cI was taught to \u2018go at\u2019 things. Studying, working, writing, organizing, yard work, house cleaning, sewing, reading, praying, fasting: You name it, in my childhood anything worth doing was worth doing fast and going at it hard.\u201d In shamanic medicine sickness, illness and disease are present first in the spiritual realm before manifesting in the physical body. So this means that the longer the imbalanced patterns are played out in the physical, more likelihood that the body will begin to show signs of wear and tear until a more serious ailment takes hold. Thankfully, I listened to this last big \u201cknock\u201d and so my body didn\u2019t have to keep screaming at me in order for me to institute changes. The last two years, autoimmune illness gave me a gift of helping me to see everything I was missing by racing through life in order to accomplish goals and make my life count: I was losing quality of life, which cannot be found in pushing quantity. One of the spirit animals I\u2019ve worked with for about a decade now is a sea turtle. This wise ancient animal made it possible for me to keep up my physical exercise the last two years by shifting me into the element of water. Every time I tried to work out on land, I was exhausted for days and spent hours sleeping to recover my energy. I noticed that this didn\u2019t happen during my early morning swims. In fact, I gained energy and had no body pain after my aquatic sessions. Every morning, I put my fins on and shapeshifted into a dolphin, a whale, or a turtle with a prayer they would show me how to heal my body; this strategy worked. I noticed how effortless, dreamy, fluid, and meditative my workouts became. Most of all, I was further honing the law of putting in minimum effort to gain maximum efficiency; I was learning to conserve energy by just putting the right amount into completing a task. Sometimes this called for creative solutions so I could maintain integrity with what my body was telling me. For example, if someone came into my swimming lane that swam faster than me, I didn\u2019t increase my speed to \u201ckeep up,\u201d but rather doubled back so I could keep swimming at my own pace while staying out of the faster swimmers\u2019 way. I imagined the pain, tension, and illness in my body being transmuted by the salt water and asked my spirit guides to cleanse those waters of anything that could harm others. When I reflected back at how I was in my naturalness in my early childhood, BEing was a state that I was in all the time. I knew this state intimately. In fact, I sought out wholeness by going into nature for extended periods of time: watching ants march back and forth to their nests, timing how long it took a slug to make it from one end of my garden to another, and watching tall cedars sway in the wind for hours. When I entered school, I started to feel like I was losing control of my life and was often scolded for dreaming instead of DOing something productive. I started to conform and forget about that BEing state that got me into so much trouble\u2013even though I knew intuitively how important it was to my feeling of well-being. I became so stressed out that by the time I was in grade four, I started losing my hair and was diagnosed with alopecia (an autoimmune illness). At that young age, I had already developed the pattern of just \u201cgoing at\u201d things hard until I crashed physically. As an educator for twenty years, I love the message in the article \u201cLet\u2019s Stop Stealing Time from Our Children\u201d and have found it to be really wise advice that goes a long way towards valuing how children develop and what they need to be healthy: mind, body, heart, and spirit. We don’t have to worry that children won’t learn, we just have to create conditions where they keep learning in healthy ways. Creating emotionally safe, developmentally appropriate environments where children have time to explore their inner worlds in natural spaces is essential if we are going to turn back the tide on this frantic pace of living we\u2019ve created in our society. I\u2019ve watched a worrying trend in education since I began teaching that puts a lot more pressure on young children to perform academically in ways that they simply are not developmentally and neurologically designed to achieve at those ages. For example, neuroscientists know that the human brain is not ready to engage in reading until around the ages of seven to ten years old. And yet, we have been creating curriculum goals forcing teachers to ensure that preschoolers and primary aged children know how to read before they hit this neurological age bracket. Not surprisingly it\u2019s the kindergarten teachers who have pushed back hardest against this policy: \u201c[T]hey were unanimous and unwavering [in advocating for] play time and rest.” I\u2019ve seen more depressed and stressed primary aged children in recent years than I used to see as a beginning teacher and that worries me. As I advocate for the rights of children, I also find myself parenting my own inner child in gentler, kinder and more loving ways. As an adult seeing these harmful patterns in a different light, I started to apply these turtle lessons in the pool to my land-based life. I scrutinized everything I was putting my energy into and consulted with my High Self in ceremony to see what was essential and what was not. I took action by cutting way back on volunteer projects, disengaging from relational conflicts that could not be resolved at present, and anything that didn\u2019t feed by passions. I started to bring into my world things I enjoyed doing that served no purpose except to bring me pleasure (i.e. knitting, sitting in my garden with a cup of coffee watching the birds, playing ukulele, watching films). I discovered that what Prentis Hemphill says is really true and kind: \u201cBoundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.\u201d Saying no to some things allowed me to say yes to myself and to my health. Although some folks might have been disappointed with some of my decisions to remove my energy from certain situations, the higher perspective I received from Spirit assured me that life will go on with or without my presence and this was a freeing thought. I hope I am becoming a role model by making the shift inside myself that children can see and emulate. I don\u2019t know where this journey will lead me, but I do know that I can no longer go back to measuring my success by how much I get done or produce. I am feeling so much better today after all the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical healing work I\u2019ve done. And I have to say that I didn\u2019t do this alone; I enrolled the help of friends with a healing background to support me, I hired help to clean my house when I needed that, and I worked with medical professionals who have respect for spiritual practices. I am so grateful for the whole journey and I am looking forward to the adventure my turtle is leading me on step by slow step. If you are feeling burnt out, I encourage you to begin looking inside to see the patterns that need to change in your life. What will you give your energy to? What will you stop giving your energy to? Who can you enroll to support the changes you need to make to come back to a state of internal balance? Resources: article: Living in the Fifth World Prophecy article: Let\u2019s Stop Stealing Time from Our Children \u201cLeap of Faith\u201d art by Lucy Campbell *** About the Author: Jennifer Engr\u00e1cio has been a student of shamanism since 2005. Jennifer is a certified teacher who has worked with children in many different education settings since 2001. She is a certified shamanic coach, reiki master, and lomilomi practitioner; in addition, she runs Spiral Dance Shamanics. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, she now lives in Calgary, Canada with her life partner. Engr\u00e1cio participated in self-publishing three books that are now available: \u201cThe Magic Circle: Shamanic Ceremonies for the Child and the Child Within\u201d \u201cWomen\u2019s Power Stories: Honouring the Feminine Principle of Life\u201d \u201cDreaming of Cupcakes: A Food Addict\u2019s Shamanic Journey into Healing\u201d For more information go to: www.spiraldanceshamanics.com Dreaming of Cupcakes: A Food Addict\u2019S Shamanic Journey into Healing on Amazon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":234,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/234"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20046"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19811,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20046\/revisions\/19811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}