Self-love is fundamental, but remains a Sisyphusian task for many. What would it take for you to respect, honor, and deeply value yourself? This is the challenge of love. To meet it we must choose to return to the Source, to reconnect with our purpose, and remember why we are here apart from our history and story. The challenge of love requires that we spend some time in actually loving actions to free the child from old wounds, to free the adult from the expectations of others, to individuate from parents, and to step out into the world as the someone that you love this elusive challenge of love is and how the challenge of loving your self evolves as you evolve in your own nature. This is a time of falling in love with why you are here, with the feeling of meaning and purpose that nourishes your heart and with the engaging mental challenge of bringing your gifts into the world.

Centering the heart’s wisdom is rare in our plethora of movements, traditions, and modalities that we engage to tend our Body, Mind, and Spirit. Many modalities engage tools of the body, mind, and spirit to bypass our emotional experience and the way of true love. Yet our heart and emotions are wise wild teachers for emotionally mature spiritual adults. Concluding this three part series, Langston interviews Christina on the opportunities we can create for the times we are in when we choose to access the wisdom of our heart and our emotions. Join us this week as they explore how to more fully center the wisdom of the heart in our lives and practices. Discover the ways the heart and our emotions are uniquely suited to guide us towards a more just, connected, and liberated world.

With all of our Body, Mind, and Spirit practices we still rarely address the heart or our emotions. Even when our emotions are mentioned, they are often treated as something we need to regulate, discharge, or pathologize when intense. We are often taught to bypass our emotions rather than allowing our heart and emotions to be the wise wild teachers they are meant to be. With so few references for what a healthy adult relationship with emotions looks like, it can be hard to even imagine what a mature life affirming emotional response might feel like. This week Langston Kahn interviews Christina Pratt to explore “emotional maturity” and expressing our emotions in service of life and the more just world we are striving to create. Join us as they explore how to discern between appropriate emotional intensity or indulgence, true peace or bypassing, and how to liberate and honor our authentic emotional response.

Today there are a plethora of movements, traditions, and modalities that promise to help us tend our Mind, Body, and Spirit. However, rarely is the heart or our emotions addressed. Even when our emotions are mentioned, they are often treated as something we need to regulate, discharge, or transcend. And any experience of emotional intensity is pathologized. Rather than allowing our heart and emotions to be the wise wild teachers they are meant to be, many modalities engage tools of the body, mind, and spirit to bypass our emotional experience and the way of true love. This week Langston Kahn interviews Christina Pratt on the importance of reclaiming our authentic emotional response in times of transition. Join us as they explore this key component of accessing the sacred wisdom of our heart where our mind, body, and spirit can come into true harmony.

The sacred is inherent in all things. Relationship with the sacred nourishes our deeper self, rekindles our passion for our soul’s purpose, and opens the way for love to enter our lives. Yet we have largely lost the art of being in relationship with the sacred. In everyday life we starve our deeper self of the energies that nourish it, indulge our stories of isolation and separation and justify depression or aggression as appropriate responses to life and its teachings. The sacred, immune to our folly, is patient and present, waiting for us to remember how to tend our relationship with it. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, shares the basics of shamanic practice that retrain our intention, perception, and imagination to engage with the sacred as a natural course of our everyday lives.

Sacrifice enlivens our spirit. It opens the way for miracles or the impossible or that which we truly desire to come into our lives. To enliven the spirit in our shamanic practice we must learn to step out of our comfort zones where we feel the simple exhilaration of surfing the surface wave and step into the deep soul satisfying discomfort of becoming people who will make a significant spiritual contribution to life on earth. Author, therapist, and internationally recognized teacher, Sandra Ingerman, joins host, Christina Pratt, this week to explore how we move our shamanic practices from serving our own visions to surrendering intimately to spirit and serving our part in the larger vision. Join us this week and discover who we need to become to engage in the transformations through love that are the needed medicines for our time.

At the core of living well is the ability to center love as a place of power in any circumstance. This is equally, and in some circumstances differently, true individually and collectively. To center love empowers us to remember what we care about, what has value, and what is meaningful for us to commit time, energy, and resources toward. It reminds us why we should bother. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she shares practices and explores the dynamics involved stepping into love as an act of revolution, liberation, and creation of a new world. This week look at how the Cycle Teachings help us to meet the waves of stress that keep rolling in from climate change, pandemic demands on space and time, social strain of living with life narratives that refuse to ground in reality, and the heartbreak of not knowing how to show up as parents for all of the ways this is affecting our children.

We interpret the world and our experience through our mind. Ancient peoples understood this and were sophisticated enough to leave nothing to chance. The ancient mind was trained first by stories and then by ceremonial engagement with the invisible world and education in a cosmology that was as functional as it was accurate. The ancient mind was prepared to become the shaman mind and take on the challenge of interpreting altered states of consciousness. “The contemporary mind is weak and vulnerable to seductions,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “where the story telling is left to the media and ceremony runs from vapid and self centered to empty and self destructive, there is no coherent cosmology to illuminate the way. The mind is utterly unprepared to accurately interpret life itself much less enter altered states reliably. Join us this week as we explore the shaping of the shaman’s mind.

There is nothing quite as powerful as making your own power objects and shamanic tools. Artist and shamanic teacher, Evelyn C. Rysdyk, joins us this week to share her new book, A Spirit Walker’s Guide to Shamanic Tools. This is a beautifully illustrated guide to creating, decorating, consecrating, and using sacred tools in ritual and healing. Evelyn explores everything from how to use little known tools like shamanic mirror and wind staffs to responsible ways of obtaining your materials to the sacred process for creating your own drums, rattles, bundles and staffs. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she and her guest explore part three of the Shamanic Practice Series: creating shamanic tools.

A spiritual life is nothing but dogma and deception without the heart’s active presence. The heart’s active presence will soon wander, bored to death with you, if you refuse to engage regularly and intimately with ecstasy. Ecstasy, the falling into the fire naked losing yourself to One surrender ecstasy that comes in union with your helping spirits is one of the great gifts of spiritual life in a shamanic practice. So then why are our shamanic practices so stodgy, precious, (frankly) boring, and ineffective in creating large-scale life change? Join us for part two of a series on creating an effective shamanic practice in your day-to-day life. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the necessary terror in igniting the ecstatic heart and how to keep the fire of true love burning at the core of your shamanic practice while you passionately engage the world.