Beyond Awakening

Living the Mystery: Opening Up to Gaia's Song of Grief and Love

by Terry Patten | October 13, 2016

With don Oscar Miro-Quesada

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don-oscarOn Sunday, I was joined by Western-educated kamasqa curandero and shamanic adept don Oscar Miro-Quesada for: Living the Mystery: Opening Up to Gaia’s Song of Grief & Love

don Oscar Miro-Quesada is a seasoned navigator of non-ordinary states of consciousness who helps people access realms of being where multidimensional powers are available for healing self, others and our beloved Mother Earth. He has been guiding ethno-spiritual apprenticeship expeditions to sacred sites of the world since 1986, with special emphasis on Peru and Bolivia. His work and shamanic training programs have been featured on CNN, Univision, A&E, the Discovery Channel and the History Channel.

What I especially appreciate about Oscar is not his credentials but the fact that he is an immensely warm, loving human being who deeply cares about people and our planet. He is a master at creating sacred community using his infectious belly laugh and the magic of joy, love and compassion to gently weave people together as a planetary family. He brings keen attention to life-transforming ceremonial detail and group healing dynamics and creates “sacred hoops,” both in person and using virtual teaching formats.

Oscar describes his life as “transforming the world through sacred living.” His unique vision for pragmatic global spiritual regeneration was born from the co-creation of sustainable, earth-honoring, sacred communities worldwide. When I’m with him, my heart gets stronger and deeper.

So often, as planetary citizens, we don’t dare to penetrate the veil of denial of our human ecological predicament, when the living earth, still incredibly alive and beautiful, has begun to show us that she has a fever brought on by the never-ending appetites of human industrial civilization.

I asked Oscar to reflect upon this. How can we best navigate the territory of denial and facing fear, of despair and hope, of grieving and celebrating, of joy and sadness?

Oscar pointed to the Inka concept of Ayni or “sacred reciprocity.” Throughout our lives, we are constantly giving and receiving and often the receiving part seems more important to humans than the giving. Our task, Oscar says, is to find a balance between our true needs and that which we are obligated to pass forward and generously offer others. In the Andean communities, this is reflected in the practice of giving away excess food and wool to those who need it, “today for me, tomorrow for you,” establishing a kind of homeostasis of material well-being that reflects the sacred balance seen in the rhythms of nature.

Oscar laid out his 5 traditional axioms of traditional ritual:

  1. Consciousness begets matter — This is a psychophysical universe in which interior and exterior realities constantly affect each other, not a dead mechanistic world.
  1. Language begets reality — the words we speak and the questions we ask help or obstruct our entering into contact with the soul of the earth. It’s part of constructing our shared reality.
  1. Ritual begets relationship — While ritual is fundamental to all indigenous spirituality, our modern and post-modern culture has lost ritual, and thus relationship with a sentient multiverse and living planet. A daily ritual of Anyi, giving thanks for anything more than our basic survival needs, would serve to give greater humility and a sense of contact with the sacred web of life.
  1. Nature begets purpose — Knowing our place gives us a sense of what we love and how we can serve.
  1. Love begets life in a dance between Gaia’s love and grief that gives us appreciation for what we have.

When I first met Oscar, with a group of evolutionary leaders in Ashland, Oregon, the first thing I noticed about him was his deep love of ceremony and ritual and how beautifully he is able to imbue them both with feeling and force. When I asked him to reflect on the centrality of ritual to his path and teaching, he pointed to its fundamental role in restoring sacred trust between humankind and the natural world.

Oscar pointed out that rituals function to overcome the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane. When you ritualize the energy behind the split, what emerges is wholeness and middle ground. Rituals are also make whole the broken parts of our dissociated experience of life. Suffering, breakdown and pain become “grist for the mill,” allowing us to enter into relationship with the purpose of disorder and disease in our lives.

The efficacy of ritual also depends on our freedom from self and our willingness to be still, within and without. The more we can open up as a hollow bone, and allow the wisdom of Source to open through us as ritual, the less contaminated we will be by aggressive agendas. We are able to maintain the tension between health and sickness, opening up a deep appreciation for this miraculous moment, for what is.

The most profound moment of our dialogue came when Oscar went into ceremony with our listeners, using the language of the highland people of South America, “the descendants of the Inka,” a powerful onomatopoeia that conjured the unseen forces that inhabit the mythic soul-infused powers of his people. Oscar says this language mirrors the subtle expressions of the earth and the big bang postulated by the great thinkers of our modern world.

During the ceremony, he guided us from profane space to sacred space, and from from profane clock time to sacred cyclical time. His soul came alive, resonating with everyone present for the ceremony and opening up a powerful energetic field.

I invite you to listen to the full recording. You’ll also hear Oscar’s suggestions for creating personal meditative ritual in your life, including the simple act of walking, and the daily and nightly practice of connecting with and giving thanks to the Mystery. In this way, we can continue learning, being of service, and transforming ourselves and our world.

You can listen to the entire dialogue with Oscar here.

Share your comments on our Facebook page here.

Announcement

Please join me Sunday, October 23rd at 10 AM Pacific for Living the Mystery: Opening Up to Gaia’s Song of Grief and Love with Peruvian Shaman don Oscar Miro-Quesada.

Regular listeners to Beyond Awakening are aware that I’ve spent the last year deeply considering how integral practice can address our larger ecological predicament. Vital, soul-level conversations with Peter Russell, Stephen Jenkinson, Michael Dowd, and Michael Meade have pressed deep into that territory.

Now I want to explore one of the most vital conversations I think we can have in this moment. Something beautiful becomes possible when people arrive together in profound contact with the great mystery, in a shamanic relationship with the spirit of the living planet. And that can be powerfully invoked and blessed by the unbroken sacred indigenous lineages that connect us with our ancient ancestors.

That’s why I invited don Oscar Miro-Quesada Solevo to dialogue with me next. He has become a personal heart friend, and he is uniquely skilled in guiding a ritual plunge into shamanic contact with the anima mundi or the “soul of the world”. He can do the ceremony. And he can articulate it.

Plus, he’s skilled and experienced at bringing ritual alive via an audio connection among people from all over the world. He accepted my invitation and we have decided together to make our conversation an occasion to dive deep into the dark waters of the shamanic soul in the presence of what I call the “koan” the impossible question of our human predicament. We will lean into the questions that emerge from these uncharted territories, and don Oscar will go into ceremony to shift the energetic ground of everyone who tunes in live or listens to the recording.

In ceremony, don Oscar speaks the language of the highland people of South America, “the descendants of the Inka”. It is a powerful onomatopoeia that conjures and summons the unseen forces and powers that inhabit the mythic soul-infused powers of his people. In ceremony, Oscar’s soul often comes alive, resonating with everyone present for the ceremony and opening up a powerful energetic field.

Then in English, he guides people into a place of blissful stillness and deep silence and presence, beyond all need to reach anything or receive a benefit. But people often find a powerful boost to their ability to dream who they are becoming and who they can be. The actual flow is a seamless field of conductivity, a mystical participation in genuine cross-cultural medicine.

Our vision is that this ceremony can prepare the ground for deep dialogue between us, a dialectic that can become a synthesis. We both are lovers of Mother Earth.

Even though we have powerful, meticulous, science-based, predictive models, the living planet exceeds our knowledge, and thus the future is profoundly unpredictable. So don Oscar and I will join together after the ceremony, casting away all pretenses of certainty. We will dialogue about how we can restore soul to our experience of living among the soul-less surfaces of postmodern culture, working to restore and serve the ability (in us and others) to live with deep and joyous thanksgiving for the wonderfully unpredictable nature of life, and walk in the beauty of the anima mundi.

About don Oscar Miro-Quesada

don Oscar Miro-Quesada Solevo is a respected Western-educated kamasqa curandero and altomisayoq adept from Peru. He is an OAS Fellow in Ethnopsychology and an UN Invited Observer to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. He is also the visionary founder of The Heart of the Healer foundation, the originator of Pachakuti Mesa Tradition of cross-cultural shamanism, and the co-author of Lessons in Courage: Peruvian Shamanic Wisdom for Everyday Life.

A seasoned navigator of non-ordinary states of consciousness, don Oscar helps people from all walks of life to access realms of being where multidimensional powers and forces are available for healing self, others and our beloved Mother Earth as a whole. He has been guiding ethnospiritual apprenticeship expeditions to sacred sites of the world since 1986, with special emphasis on Peru and Bolivia. His work and shamanic training programs have been featured on CNN, Univision, A&E, the Discovery Channel and the History Channel.

More important than all the credentials, however, is the fact that Oscar is an immensely warm, loving human being who deeply cares about people and our planet. He is a master at creating sacred community using his infectious belly laugh and the magic of joy, love and compassion to gently weave people together as a planetary family. He brings keen attention to life-transforming ceremonial detail and group healing dynamics and creates sacred hoops in person and via online and other virtual teaching formats. He describes his life as “transforming the world through sacred living,” as he carries forth his unique vision for pragmatic global spiritual regeneration born from the co-creation of sustainable earth-honoring sacred communities worldwide.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE:

*Sunday October 23rd 10:00am Pacific; 11:00am Mountain; 12:00pm Central; 1:00pm Eastern

*Find Your Local Time

Please Note: There will be a limited number of lines available on the live conference call, so we encourage you to listen online if possible. To make sure you can get through by phone, we encourage you to dial in early.

ACCESS INSTRUCTIONS

Join the Dialogue: About one hour into the dialogue, we’ll open up the lines and you’ll have the opportunity to interact with us directly over the phone or via instant message. Here’s what to do:

To interact live by voice, dial into the conference line number and wait until we ask for a question from someone in your region, or

Send us your question via instant message in the teleseminar window on your computer, or

Send us your questions and comments before or during the live dialogue by posting them on our Beyond Awakening Community Facebook page

We look forward to your attendance!

Sincerely,
The Beyond Awakening Team