Our Ancestors’ Wisdom Leads to Spiritual Strength & Passion for Living

By Sandra Ingerman, a featured speaker in the Ancestral Healing Summit

We join together as a sacred community to welcome in a New Year filled with new choices that we all must make.

Life feels so surreal to many of us right now. Time does not feel like it is following a linear cycle. But we do use certain markers of time to help us ground, giving us a sense that life keeps moving on in the midst of dissolution and also rebirth cycles.

Many people feel relieved when a New Year is welcomed in. Just celebrating that event helps us put some of our past behind and gives us a sense of something new to look forward to. We get inspired to regain a sense of hope, even though many of us have lost so much during these times of such upheaval that will lead to a different way of life that we can’t quite imagine yet. 

I have been writing an inspirational newsletter called Transmutation News for over 20 years and since I began writing it, our world has suffered one trauma after another — sickness, division, war, and atrocities towards others and nature that are beyond our wildest dreams.

This also happened in ancient civilizations that were as advanced as us technologically. And then there were civilizations that had mastered the esoteric and psychic powers to create extraordinary sacred structures and magical ways of life. 

Yet something took these civilizations down. In my workshops where we journeyed to some of these ancient civilizations and asked what destroyed them, the answer was always the same – greed, ego, power over, division.

Over the years, I have written about the Anasazi who I believe shifted into another dimension as they all disappeared simultaneously. Looking at artifacts from the land they seem to have all simultaneously disappeared during dinner. These beautiful beings lived 700-1200 AD in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah. Through my shamanic journeys, it was revealed that over the course of thirty years, they transcended into a different dimension and are living a peaceful life. 

We are once again at a choice point. There were theories that were shared many years ago that the Earth suffered a nuclear war once.

Will we keep making destructive life choices? We seem to be split on this issue. But there are so many spiritual practitioners, like all of you reading this, that are working on choosing love, light, peace, kindness, and honor for all in the web of life. We perform our ceremonies together and keep taking small steps out of the darkness into the light. 

Every New Year, people get excited to read about the predictions of the year. Either they are looking for some hope or inspiration or want to know what they will have to prepare for if times get more challenging. 

Each year, I encourage people to stay in the present. For the present creates the future. And if you are too focused on what will happen next you are not creating a new dream for the Earth. 

For myself, I wish to share a couple of themes to focus on for the year. And these themes are: reigniting our spiritual strength and passion for life.

When we are walking through the Dark Night of the Soul, the greatest tool we have is being guided by our spiritual light. And — as I keep sharing — the only way out is through. The power of our inner spiritual fire has the strength to keep us walking, so we eventually find our way into the light. 

My mother Lee Ingerman was my role model on what spiritual strength can do. I watched her suffer throughout her life, but she never let her spiritual fire go out, and it kept her moving and living to almost 99. 

When she was 94 she became ill with a septic infection. One day the doctors at the hospital told me she would not live through the night. So I sat with her all night. In the middle of the night when she was hallucinating I told her it was okay to go. And she sat up so straight in bed and with her fists striking the bed she yelled out loud “I am not ready to leave this life yet!” And she didn’t. But right after she came out of the hospital she broke one of her hips, and her spiritual strength and her passion for life got her through this event again. 

I watched how her spiritual strength and passion for life kept her alive and living a good life until 99.She loved life! When she died her brain was better than mine. I always felt like she had super power as she lived on chocolate, cookies, and Coca Cola. 

We cannot deny the power of spiritual strength and passion for life and all that will help carry us through.

You can find the courage to dig deep into your own inner landscape, find your spiritual fire, and keep it ignited, so that your light can carry and guide you into whatever dimension of life that spirit brings you to.

In my second book Welcome Home, I shared my most powerful soul retrieval case study of working with a young woman dying of HIV. 

Due to my client’s long history of many illnesses, my guardian spirit said that the cause of her illness was apathy. And that the cure was passion for life. He said her lesson in this lifetime was what occurs when viruses, bacteria have more passion for life than we do. They thrive while we get so ill.

This was a powerful message to share with the world… My guardian spirit said that if viruses and bacteria have more passion for life than we do, they thrive!

When you look into the eyes of others do you see the light of passion through the general global population? Or do you see the emptiness in their eyes? I don’t see most people in the modern world having a burning passion for life. I see a lot of apathy, emptiness, and hopelessness. 

How do we survive the times we are in without the fire of spirit and passion for life? This is a question to ponder and to come up with some answers, so you can change the reality you are living in right now — and rise up to making new choices that will bring health on all levels into your life. 

This is a time to take what we have learned from our ancestors from ancient civilizations seriously.

We have an opportunity to make new choices as we look at creating a life filled with love, light, harmony, horror, respect, and kindness towards all of life.
 

Sandra Ingerman is an award winning author of 12 books on shamanism, including Walking in Light: The Everyday Empowerment of a Shamanic Life, The Book of Ceremony: Shamanic Wisdom for Invoking the Sacred in Everyday Life, and Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self. She is also the presenter of eight audio programs produced by Sounds True.

Sandra, a world-renowned teacher of shamanism, has been teaching for close to 40 years. She’s taught workshops internationally on shamanic journeying, healing, and reversing environmental pollution using spiritual methods. She is recognized for bridging ancient cross-cultural healing methods into our modern culture to address the needs of our times.

Sandra is known for gathering the global spiritual community together to perform powerful transformative ceremonies — and for inspiring us to stand strong in unity so that we do our own spiritual and social activism work while keeping a vision of hope, and serving as a light in the world.

Sandra, a licensed marriage and family therapist and professional mental health counselor, is also a board-certified expert on traumatic stress. Watkins Body Mind Spirit magazine honored her by including her in their 100 Most Spiritually Influential People of 2020. She was also chosen as one of the Top 10 Spiritual Leaders of 2013 by Spirituality & Health magazine, and was awarded the 2007 Peace Award from the Global Foundation for Integrative Medicine.

Sandra joined in partnership with Renee Baribeau to create a weekly 30-minute podcast called The Shamans Cave.You can learn more at her website.