More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Life isn’t meant to be easy. If it were, we wouldn’t need prayer, or spirituality, or healing at all.
Indigenous spirituality is not a religion; it’s a nature-based way of living in alignment with Mother Earth and the spiritual laws of the universe.
Conscious living is a modern term for the ancient way of living in harmony with the laws of nature and how the personal choices and decisions we make will affect the lives of our unborn relatives seven generations from today.
Mindful consumption is a modern term for the ancient practice of respecting and honoring all beings on Mother Earth. We’ll learn the practice of being intentional and deliberate with our impact on the earth and the beauty of walking on our journey of life with the awareness of a circular mindset.
Collective impact describes the process of finding your truth and being a part of a like-minded community. We discuss how to elevate awareness and become a living example of truth in action. We also learn about activism and how to shine a light on the crimes being perpetrated against our Mother Earth and our relatives from every nation.
Organized religion has had a death grip on our one-on-one spiritual relationship with Mother Earth for the last few thousand years. In essence, religions have hijacked our natural sense of spirituality. Religious leaders have led us to believe that they want us to have a personal relationship with God, but they create systems and processes that force us to go through their particular brand of corporate spiritual salvation.
But when we become comfortable enough to step away from religious dogma, we may experience that the Creator is still present even without the pageantry, punishment, rules, and doctrine of obedient belief that is so frequently a part of organized religion.
Each distinct thing in this world has a natural energy, and natural energy comes in positive and negative forms, as well as masculine and feminine forms.
Good medicine is the essence that’s created when at least two things come together and create something good and positive.
Each and every morning offers us a chance to start anew, fresh, and to begin again. Each morning when we wake—should we choose to listen—is a message from the Creator to remember the privilege we were given of waking up.
If humanity were to collectively honor our gift of a new beginning every morning, it would be enough to heal the world.
Fire represents the fundamental principles and building blocks of humanity: warmth, safety, security, food, family, and community.
The simple act of practicing gratitude disrupts negative thoughts and changes our mindset to see the world in a positive way.
In Native American culture, generosity is a way of life, built on the communal value of equality. But in cultures built on colonialism, equality is not a value; instead, value is found in ownership, in the exploitation of resources for profit, in hoarding wealth, and in leveraging power over others.
White is the light that’s in all of us and is a reminder that we must first learn to see light in our self before we can truly see the light in others.
One of the greatest lessons the ancestors have given us is this: what we speak, we create. Our words are powerful, and they can heal as well as destroy, which is why we must be mindful of the intention behind our words and use our voice for good.
We can learn about humility and humbleness the easy way or the hard way, but we will learn this lesson one way or another. If our minds are breeding grounds for corruption and our hearts are filled with greed and we justify our taking and taking and more taking, then Mother Earth will come and humble us.
There’s a thin line between confidence and arrogance—it’s called humility. It’s been said that humility is not thinking less of our self but simply thinking of our self less.
In other words, we walk away from our own sense of dignity when we allow or apply oppression on anything or anyone else.
Compassion is the ability to feel the same feelings another person is having. Empathy is when we take action to change another person’s experience because we feel compassion for that person.
Keep in mind that it’s not always about feeling the pain and sorrow of another, for we can also choose to feel the happiness and joy of another.
Compassion offers us the chance to practice focusing on all that’s good and wonderful in the world.
The most direct path to empathy is to realize that the other person or being is us. Empathy is when we take action to change another person’s experience because we feel compassion for that other person. Empathy allows us to take action despite another being’s species, race, nationality, or social class. When humanity engages our collective sense of empathy, we can move mountains.
the Creator speaks to us through nature.
Humans are not built to process the massive amount of pain, suffering, and cruelty we constantly expose ourselves to in the online world, which in turn creates many of the diseases in our heart, mind, and body. Unplugging from the online world and plugging in to nature is imperative to heal and regenerate our life force.
When you label things, people, and experiences, you’re only going to see what you’ve been conditioned to see, regardless of how open-minded you think you are.
Almost no concept or being is fully masculine or feminine all the time—sometimes we’re connecting with our feminine energy and sometimes we’re in connection with our masculine energy.
We need to encourage and nurture the rise of the feminine power in gratitude for all the blessings the spiritual energy of the feminine has bestowed upon us. We do this by holding up our women, encouraging them to stand in their power, respecting their equal if not higher reasoning, reclaiming space for their energy and voice, and elevating them to the highest positions of power structures so they can rejuvenate our spiritually broken systems and processes. The salvation of humanity will be led by the power of the feminine.
The meaning of life is to discover our passions, and once they are discovered and developed, the purpose of life is to give our gift away.
On the Red Road, when we give something away, we never feel that anything is owed back. Ownership of things is not a concept we understand—even ownership of ideas and knowledge.
The old ones teach us that our tongue is connected to our heart—the lesson being for us to learn to speak through our heart rather than letting whatever comes into our brain go running straight out of our mouth.
Our breath carries power—our words can provide clarity, our words can heal, and our words can destroy—so let’s not be reckless or wasteful with the wisdom of our words.
“All the flowers, of all the tomorrows, are in the seeds of today.”
I used to think that top environmental problems were bio- diversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I
thought that 30 years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these, we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.
The loss of a relationship is of little consequence in comparison with the loss of our spirit.
We don’t need to be related by blood or through marriage to be a family. Being a family simply means that we share a common purpose and that we’re devoted to a common mission. The Lakota have the word thiyóšpaye, which refers to our extended family. A family holds space for one another with unconditional love and understanding.
