Monday 29 December 2014

What a wild ride! Dante’s Camino – Balancing the Extremes



JULY! What a wild ride! Us ladies decided to call this group Dante’s Camino (Dante’s walk or Dante’s way) as we were preparing ceremony food (exotic fruit!) one day. It became really clear to everyone that what we focus on is amplified in our lives, and that it is so important we focus on things that are positive, life enhancing and productive, rather than that which we don’t want in a negative pole vibration. It is our choice and responsibility to choose wisely what we want to make real in our lives. We visited the extremes and came out clear and healed in the end. It was quite a wild ride!

This beautiful group came together and through the thick and thin of it supported each other’s growth in all that needed to be cleared. The first couple ceremonies were indeed cleansing, and then the sweat lodge San Pedro ceremony sealed the deal, cleansing out the deeper negative energies in a profound way. It was very clear the next day how cleansed the group was after the sweat lodge ceremony. It was a breath of fresh air for such an intense cleansing to take place.

The final ceremony was indeed profound and beautiful, with such a change in everyone that we could hardly believe it ourselves how transformed everyone was. NEVER have we had such a blue sky without a cloud in it for the final ceremony like we did that day. Everyone was soooooo joyful it could hardly be contained. It was the day everyone got their wings and could journey back into the world as the angels that they are.
Well done, you beautiful souls of Dante’s Camino! You have walked the extremes and came out balanced and clean in the end. Well done! Continue to choose wisely and lovingly between the dark and the light, and put your attention on love. Thank you for being such a daring, courageous and beautiful group and facing the shadows like warriors of light and love. Love conquers all, as we got to see first hand! Let love be your guide.

Spider Daughter and the Shamans: Private Retreat



Laura Delaney (Spider Daughter) is a graduate of University of Metaphysical Sciences, which is the organization that built Gaia Sagrada Shamanic Center. She just earned her Masters Degree and created a retreat at Gaia Sagrada as her masters project. What a great masters project she did! Twenty people came with her to Gaia Sagrada and had an incredible…experience!
Facilitating a retreat is a visionary idea that takes quite a bit of effort to bring into tangible form. It is more mundane than anyone realizes, glorious as it all sounds. From sending out the announcements, getting the word out, handling emails and questions, lining up the shamans and setting up their transportation, putting it together, overseeing classes and workshops between the ceremonies, and manifesting it from a dream and idea into a real and solid event on the Earth, what a project!
Laura was a wonderful facilitator, a natural at this retreat stuff! She was really nice to everyone while getting it all done, and everyone had a great time and an enlightening experience. Laura got her name, Spider Daughter, during an ayahuasca experience long ago through her connection with the dream worlds, as spiders are the dreamweavers, weaving the web of dreams.
The Ayahuasca shamans she booked, Wareni and Catalina, were wonderful! They sang beautifully, brought lovely medicine from Colombia, and were really good people with beautiful hearts. Wareni is a trance master with his singing, Catalina too, and Catalina also brought with her some of the most beautiful beaded jewelry we have ever seen. Ayahuasca patterns were quite evident in her work!
We booked the sweat lodge shamans for her group, Paulina and Salvador, a beautiful husband and wife shaman team, and wow! What a powerful sweat lodge. They sang beautifully and robustly, had a great male/female balance in the energy of the medicine. The heat cleansed us all to the umpteenth degree!
Well done, Laura! You are quite the master facilitator! What a wonderful event you put together, and the people you attracted and brought with you says a lot about who you are! Beautiful! Don’t be shy, you rock! I will always be in admiration of you, and I am amazed at the beauty with which you create things on the Earth. You have such a big heart and care a lot. You are a rare being in this world and quite the visionary!
All of you who came to Gaia Sagrada for Laura’s private retreat and masters project for University of Metaphysical Sciences, what a beautiful group you are. We will remember you with fondness and you are always welcome back to Ecuador with open arms. You are all very special. Thank you for choosing Gaia Sagrada for this special journey!

Anyone Have A Quinoa or Chia Seed Thresher?



We grew LOTS of quinoa, that life affirming and vitality creating grain that has lots of protein, vitamins and minerals, including some omegas, much better than rice for whatever grain needs we have! You can use it in place of rice so that there is more nutrition in your meal, make gluten free bread with it, everything! We grew about 6 acres of it! (3 hectares). NOW we have to figure out how to thresh it and get it ready for consumption…

We were going to do it by hand but now realize that is going to take way too long. Now we are trying to find a good thresher, a machine that takes all the seeds out of the stalks and gets it ready for the next step. We have tried to find someone here in Ecuador who can rent a threshing machine to us, but no such luck! They are all in Bolivia, the country that grows most of the quinoa that is in the world.
The quinoa grows terrific here in the Andes of Ecuador, as it is a native plant to the Andes. It likes the warm days and the cool nights, so we have the perfect climate. We are also trying our hand at Chia seeds, and we will soon find out how well Chia seeds grow here. Some say that when Chia seeds are grown at these higher altitudes it has more nutrients.
One friend who grew Chia at a thousand feet lower said get ready to have a battle with the birds! They LOVE chia seeds and can clean out a whole field worth of chia seeds in no time. He said when the Chia seeds are ready we have to grab them right away or the birds will eat them all! I don’t mind sharing some with the birds, but hey, leave some for us!!!
We are finding that the only place to buy one of these threshers is in China! Yikes! I have never tried to order a big industrial machine from China, have you? Oh boy! More learning curve. However, we need to have our own thresher because it can thresh not only quinoa, but also chia, sesame, and lots of other things.
We will be able to help all our neighbors grow and sell quinoa and chia if we have a thresher because then they will be able to process all their crops with us helping them. It could a whole new business enterprise for all our neighbors on the surrounding mountains. They have been watching our quinoa endeavor closely, with lots of curiosity as to how it would work for them if it works for us.
If you can fit a big quinoa thresher in your suitcase when you come, let us know!!! (just kidding!)

June Ayahuasca Retreat Went Awesome!



Another one of those beautiful soul families came through here! We are naming them Los Primeros (The Firsts) since they were the first to try out our new ceremonial pavilion for the outdoor San Pedro ceremonies. What an awesome new ceremonial gazebo we have now. We used it and it works perfectly! The energy in there is so sweeeet!

We had yet another transformative and amazing retreat, with huge changes for everyone and new directions becoming clearer for all who were at a crossroads in life. Ayahuasca shows the way, and San Pedro gives you the power to make it happen. Go!

Everyone had so much fun, too. Lots of laughter, lots of jokes, and yes, there were serious moments too, with tears of grief, sadness and even joy at the new beginnings that were to begin when returning home. Hurts from the past were let go, anger at how things went in life were put to peace, and love was embraced by all as they look now at life from a different perspective.
What a diverse group the June retreat group is. People from Europe, Australia, USA, Korea, Nicaragua, and probably some other places I am forgetting to mention. Everyone in these groups come from so many different cultures, backgrounds and histories. It is wonderful how we get to see the world coming together right here at Gaia Sagrada. Who says peace isn’t possible in the world? We are all the same, really. Everyone just wants to be happy!
We will miss you all, and will always remember you as Los Primeros, the first to try out the new San Pedro ceremonial gazebo! Thanks for breaking it in and starting the vortex of energy that is there for all to enjoy as time comes to pass in the future. Thanks for sharing all your talents, the yoga, the rumba, the music, and the love!

Laugh instead of Cry: Raging Bull Episode!



April 2014 Ayahuasca Retreat: The Crazy Moon Group!
The April 2014 retreat went wonderful! That particular soul family that gathered at Gaia Sagrada, well, they came together on a most interesting date. It was the beginning of the Cardinal Cross, which in Astrology indicates a big change for humanity is coming, hasn’t happened for 2000 years, and now it’s here!
The Cardinal Cross is made up of four red moon eclipses, each 6 months apart, and the first red moon eclipse happened during this retreat.
This is a time when astrologically it is very intense. Therefore this group has been nicknamed The Crazy Moon Group! Now throw in the mix Easter weekend, which signifies the energy of death and resurrection, and that’s an amazing blend of energies for transformation!
There was lots of laughing involved during this retreat, lots of hot-tub get-togethers, and a general sense of well being and joy! It was fun! Several people who at the beginning of the retreat said they get a little too serious and cry too much, well, they got some great happiness therapy at this retreat! Everyone left with a lot of laughter behind them.
The Raging Bull
At the end of the retreat, at the end of the last ceremony (the daytime San Pedro ceremony) Christine had to shoo away a raging bull, a symbolic ending to our last ceremony at the April retreat. It was a perfect manifestation for the ending of that particular retreat. The bull was even jokingly named after one of our participants who was in the circle, kinda like a giant, strong, beautiful bull himself. The bull must have gotten stung by a bee or something because it just started bucking and going wild, off in the distance, like at a rodeo.
At first we all watched with amusement as the bull romped around, with our tiny Ecuadorian grandmother neighbor in her indigenous colorful skirt trying to get him under control. Then suddenly the bull came up the hill our way, noticing us as if for the first time and trying to decide if he wanted to come over and charge at us for the fun of it. Suddenly all of us were ready to climb up the nearby trees because danger was now a moment away!
Christine jumped into action right away, leaving the circle with her poncho, and charged at the bull, shrieking fiercely, raising her poncho to make herself look like a huge bird with giant wings. She shooed the bull off with a few loud yells, just like the protective mother she is.
The bull stopped dead in his tracks with a blank stare as if he’d been quite startled, wide-eyed as she came at him, and then ran away as quickly as he could when he realized Christine wasn’t anything he wanted to mess with. She was crazier than he was, he assessed!
There was never any real danger, as the bull wouldn’t have done much and was pretty tame, but still, it was a little bit of excitement at the end of the last ceremony of the retreat. What a great symbol for all the work we’d done as a group. What a perfect ending to the retreat. It made everyone laugh pretty hard. We have finally calmed the raging bull in each of us, learning how to use power benevolently and wisely. That was a big theme in the retreat. Nothing like a raging bull at the end to seal the deal!
We always let our neighbors graze a few cows on our land. They make great lawnmowers, no fuel, ecologically Earth friendly, can’t beat it. And what great garden compost they make on the other end. You’ll see our grandmother neighbor from next door in her Ecuadorian skirt, we call her affectionately “Abuelita” which means beloved grandmother, moving huge cows around on our property with no problem. It’s sweet to see. Gives you the Ecuadorian experience of the country as it really is with indigenous cultures.

Wake me up when September comes!



This was an interesting month! A really wonderful group of people gathered, all ages, and they were all good sports throughout the retreat. The shamans did a great job working with this group and gave everyone great journeys.

Of course the first ayahuasca ceremony was all about cleansing and releasing, with everyone letting go of the burdens of the world on many levels, physical, emotional and mentally. Lots of purging for those who had some cleansing to do!

The first San Pedro ceremony, all night, blew everyones minds… 

As always, Santiago delivers a magical experience with the magical San Pedro. Much healing took place. Some were overwhelmed but got through it gracefully and realized there was much to heal, and knew there was still more time in the retreat to do so, others embraced the challenge of their healing head on and dove right in,an and cried the tears if any were needed, or released the past in the places where it needed to be let go. In the morning we all welcomed the new day with a fresh new attitude, forever changed.
The third ceremony, the medicine sweat lodge with both medicines, cleansed everyone even more deeply. The shamans Sofia and Salvador carried purifying energy in their songs and prayers, and everything changed. Nothing toxic in a person’s system could remain after this ceremony! Many stayed up until the wee hours of the morning solving the problems of the world, playing a game of picking a new name if they were to have one, and making each other giggle a lot under the stars.

On Saturday everyone went to town for a day in the historic district, what fun! Some went to Banos, the hot springs near Cuenca. Others cruised around town to check out the sites, and of course a yummy meal was had.

The fourth ceremony was the second Ayahuasca ceremony, and wow! Everyone traveled really far and had big visions this time. After the previous three ceremonies, everyone was primed and ready to go really deep into themselves. Not much vomiting this time around, either! Everyone is really clean now!
The fifth and final ceremony, the second San Pedro ceremony, was the magical ending everyone was looking for, with a beautiful close the retreat. This is where the final release came, and the final opening to the answers from within, making a new way of being in the world now the norm. Happy birthday everyone!
Everyone always leaves Gaia Sagrada with an experience they will never forget. Everyone leaves with answers they never thought they would have, or give up on really needing to know because now life can be lived in a whole new way, moment to moment, awake and aware in the ever unfolding now moment. Life takes care of itself when you can live this way!

Ping Pong Ball Sized Hail Stones in Ecuador!



Well here’s something that hardly ever happens in Ecuador. A hailstorm! The November group came in with a bang! So big that most of them had to carry their backpacks and suitcases in the dark down the driveway to the rooms amidst ping pong ball sized hailstones on the ground everywhere! The van that picked them up at the airport couldn’t enter. This happened the day before Halloween. Muuuuaaaahahahahaha, Muuuuaaahahahaha!
All our workers said they have never seen anything like it. We all ran for cover when it started, and everyone was trapped wherever we were until it stopped. It was otherworldly for sure. Hailstones make a lot of noise when they hit the roof, eh? They pattered everywhere like stones falling from the sky. I think someone could have been killed if they were stuck out there with no cover!
Yogi the dog got disoriented and ran around in circles until… Bruce grabbed him and threw him in the kitchen as he passed by. Then Bruce put a chair over his head to run out into the hail and come to see if I was ok. What a sweet guy! He ran through hail to make sure I was ok! What a guy! A hailstone even drew blood on his arm, it hit him so hard. Good thing it wasn’t his head. Might have broken the hail stone!
I was with our foreman who runs the maintenance crew, as we were discussing where to hang some shelves on the walls in some of the rooms in Casa Tranquilo. We both went outside to watch, trapped under the porch of Casa Tranquilo. We both watched with amazement, wondering if the roofs were going to make it. Whew! What a ride! I climbed up into the attic to see how it was going with the roof and it was ok. All the toilet paper was safe!
The Gaia Sagrada pickup truck got some dents on the hood, but nothing too bad. It gives the car character. Kinda like life, huh? The knocks give us character. Nature once again shows us little humans who is boss!
Afterwards we all went around and looked to see how all the roofs were, and a couple sunroofs over the bathrooms and a couple rooms got broken. A few tiles got broken, but nothing too serious. The guys had it fixed in a day. It was worth the adventure of it all though.
Wow! Hail the size of ping pong balls in Ecuador. Who woulda thunk it? This stuff only happens in the north, right? Or the far south. Not at the equator! Boy, I sure wouldn’t have wanted to be out in an open field when that happened. One of the workers stuck his hand out to see how bad it was and he got quite a few bruises, silly guy! No tangling with the ping pong ball sized hailstones, ok?
A big thank you goes out to the November group for all you did to help us clean up afterwards, and what a bang they came in with. This will indeed be a most interesting retreat. The November group blows in like a beautiful squall. All of them are so strong and beautiful. This is unusual weather for Ecuador. Usually it is warm and sunny, but this blew some cold in from the north or something! We are looking forward to working with you, November group. Let’s move some energy and shake it loose!!!!

Legend of the Eagle and the Condor



The Legend of the Eagle and the Condor comes from the indigenous people of South America, particularly Peru and Ecuador shamans. Basically, it states, “When the Eagle and the Condor come together in harmony, there will be peace on Earth.”
The Eagle represents North America and the Condor represents South America. The eagle has to do with thinking, strategizing, mind, and figuring things out, while the condor represents compassion, heart, connection to the Earth, and sensitivity. Neither of these two traits accomplishes everything alone. Together these two aspects work in conjunction to create completion.
Soon will come a time when all races come together, humanity sees itself as One. This balance is so important for the well-being of humanity as a whole. If it is not achieved, humanity will literally undo itself and its own civilization. The way things are run right now, this reality is not sustainable.
The shamans of South America have seen that humanity will indeed come together in both mind and heart. This is what the Legend of the Eagle and the Condor is all about. Those of us who come to South America from the Caucasian nations are ourselves a manifestation of the Eagle and the Condor Legend coming true.
Are you an Eagle too? If so, come to South America and help to manifest this beautiful Legend of the Eagle and the Condor simply by retreating for a while and connecting with nature and your deepest spiritual essence!

Iglesia Serenidad y Paz



Iglesia Serenidad y Paz (Church of Serenity and Peace)

Iglesia Serenidad y Paz holds meditation services at Gaia Sagrada. The name of the church translates as Iglesia (church) Serenidad (serenity) y (and) Paz (peace). This church does not adhere to one particular belief system. All beliefs are invited.

Iglesia Serenidad y Paz Creedo

  • God is One Being, and we are all part of that One Self. As humanity awakens, our Oneness becomes more and more evident.
  • All beings are in the likeness of God. To know God, we must study our own consciousness and go within.
  • God is not outside of anyone or anything. God is the consciousness of all beings and objects, animate and inanimate.
  • We each must take responsibility for the reality we have created and also take responsibility for changing it if we are not happy with it.
  • All are here to expand consciousness and attain the abilities of unconditional love and forgiveness.
  • Freewill is to be honored at all times.
  • All paths to God are valid; all beliefs are welcome.