I feel the prayer circles, the chanting, the purification ceremonies, and the Love sending, as well as the spiritual mantrams, laying down a new foundation. I feel the vibrations in North Dakota lifted up into a more loving stream, even in the midst of the spinning turmoil going on around it. It is a huge undertaking, the groundwork having been laid down centuries ago, and our collective alignment with the heavens is opening new doors. Spiritual work is a dedicated, century-by-century practice, shedding the layers of toxic harm while opening to more loving connections. That is what a Spiritual Evolution looks like as it contributes to our precious Mother Earth. What was happening in North Dakota, miles from my home, was one of those holy moments in this richly-hewn time. All is suspended and everything about the region is charged with a sacredness that knows no bounds. It is a vortex, a center where, if things went one way it boded bad for humanity and her survival; if another, it meant we gained new spiritual ground. We are reaching a tipping point and this moment is galvanizing it. 
Many people believe there is a light newly shining into the corruption of our egoistic, old paradigms and ways. They believe we are at a decisive moment. Last gasps are at hand and they are nasty in their last, desperate attacks. Dominant, aggressive people in authority are more and more suspect. The “Me Too” movement is demonstrating Authentic Herd Leadership through outing and ousting the bullies. Dominance is not leadership. We need more of these authentic leaders who will not tolerate dominance and aggression from our governing officials. Our country got lost in its punishing and killing paradigms. Middle America is slowing waking up to our country’s governing corruption and deceptions. True leaders welcome authentic relationships. They welcome earning “herd” trust and confidence. We can end the deleterious antics of elected officious officials, no matter how “important” that office is said to be. Nothing is higher than the Spiritual Truths of Love that include us all. Nothing.
Yet, the local and federal government, military, and police are also in review. In this defining moment, a Universal shift IS going on. Our prayers are for the Standing Rock Sioux Nation; they called in Love. The prayers are for all of us who are Earth Mother’s children, and for our children, and our children’s children. The prayers are for four-footed people, the trees, and the winged ones. This moment is sacred. It is what is needed. The paradigm has shifted. Our violent North American ways will eventually cease. There is a collective Unity of Love and Grace now at the helm. Eventually, if not sooner, it will have its way. Things will shift. There are many of us living lives that allow positive life realities to emerge. There are many who are evolving our humanness, moving more and more into alignment with our Spirit. Once there, we draw on Spirit to shift-shape things as needed, and only embody loving wishes and actions.
We are witnessing whining, aggressive voices complaining that their days are numbered in making this earth their personalized playground to exploit. They are noisy and grasping about for a way to grab what they want. Their last gasps, culled by lifetimes of negative fields, are raucous, and these unruly egos know they will not last, but will eventually die out. It is the way of a negatively ego-driven world. They, too, will yield eventually to Spirit, as Spirit manifests on Earth more and more. Or they will go away, and wish to be left alone. We really are Spiritual beings in human form. One day, when enough of us embody this reality, things will shift. Once we shift, we will look back upon the baser exploits of history, and most of us will wonder why any of us allowed this negativity to rule. It will be remembered as our collective blind spot.
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Change, so greatly desired, is not easily accomplished. Genuine change requires a sense of unity, a feeling of wholeness as happens when a person’s entire life becomes altered; mind and body, spirit and soul. The same truth applies to a country or a culture, which must touch its deepest, most inclusive roots in order to both unify and genuinely change.
Michael Meade
A new definition of leadership is emerging. These leaders are defined by their stewardship. It is what our hungering, crying world is begging us for. The old paradigm, those in authority positions forcing their will and desires on humanity, the Earth, and her animals, is no longer going to be tolerated. The tide is turning.
Liberty horses, allowed to be their true selves, like their Wild Horse cousins, only respond to true, grounded, authentic leadership that asks the horse if he or she wants to join up. When you study horse herds and how they organize their leadership, you learn that there are horses that are dominant, horses who are sentinels, and horses who are leaders. Often people confuse the dominant horses for the ones who are herd leaders. Dominant horses are pushy and aggressive. This is the place that human beings are caught in, in large part. They are confusing dominance with authentic leadership. Being a bully is the easiest thing in the world to be. This is where the U.S. government, with her endless wars, is stuck. This is where all police state mentalities undermine our collective healing of cultural wounds. This is the sabotage and stifling of our evolutionary progress. Dominance denies true connection.
There are many who have shifted out of these warring, domination beliefs and actions. These folks meet in groups and communities all over the world. They work individually, without a lot of fanfare. These are the real movers and shakers and they are quietly changing the world. People today are training, in horse clinics, how to be true leaders. They are discovering that leadership and organizational leadership programs enable them to create cultures of trust and rapport.
True Leaders of the Herd know wisely how to lead the herd to safety, water, and pastures. They see what direction the herd needs to go for positive outcomes, and they go there. When left in freedom, they find their own loving intelligence and flow in organizations. The sentinels stand back a bit from the herd. They watch the horizons, assuring that all is safe. They check for dangers, including predators. When they see danger over the horizon, they summon the lead mare or stallion of the herd. These leaders, with this new information, act quietly and intentionally. They move the herd to higher ground and to safety. Love is the transformation that lets safety emerge. Knowing how to live and move in that field is what we have come to earth to learn how to do. 
Those who want to punish, harm, force, and kill to get their way will simply begin to die out as a legitimate voice. Slowly, our collective psyche sees them more and more as aggressors, bullies, and people lost at sea, not knowing how to generate authentic relationships. People see them as ineffective at having others join up, naturally, with them. Greedy, misguided, as well as mentally ill, tyrants reign by poisoning the minds and hearts of others. They are steadily losing their foothold of commandeering the collective field of humanity. Yes, it is true that presently as I write, frightened dogs are attacking Native people in North Dakota. Native people are being pepper sprayed. Senseless and wrongful deaths of Black people, at the hands of the police, are being perpetrated; and, yes, the news has knowingly buried this reality for far too long. It may seem that no positive change is in sight. And for many, that may be true—especially for those maimed or killed, with their grieving families left behind. We flounder as a society when we see these injustices and harm done to our fellow humans, the environment, and our critters. We all ask, what can we do?
More people are clamoring for a new relationship with their horse, organizations, family structures, schools, and lifestyles. They seek horse clinics that can liberate them and their horses. Carolyn Resnick and Linda Salinas pioneered how to work with horses at liberty, which gives the horse a request, and not a demand, to join up with humans. These kinds of clinics help free the spirit and soul of both the humans and their horses. Carolyn Resnick authored Liberty Work that both invites and allows activities where the horse will want to work with you. Horses who are at liberty in their work do not tolerate dominance of governing authorities or abusive relationships. They no longer feel the need to suffer fools or dominant, aggressive people.
We can evolve our relationship with horses to one that invites and allows our horse to be at liberty. We can trust it, and ourselves, to generate a connection and offer true leadership. We can generate the conditions in which the horse will want to join up with us. Because we are loving and interesting, we are standing in our true authority, our horse will respond positively. Many people on the planet have come to that. They are liberty-horse identified. There can be no more negativity that holds them, or truly diminishes them, when this shift is permanent. That groundswell of liberty beings is growing. The ways to end the violent impact of “isms” is getting help from on high. It is a deep vibrational field, and it is growing.
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The opportunity for me, in my lifetime, (at various intervals, including extricating myself from the toxic environment of my parents) was, and likely for awhile will remain: Stop being a victim to the dominant horse. Rise above these conflicted waters. Decide that you will ONLY be led through liberty systems, as you come more and more into your own caring, loving, aligned, centered place. Do you inner work. Transform your survival fighting instincts. Trade them in for loving relationships with yourself and the world. Believe that you are worthy. Believe that in your subconscious and act from that ground of being.
What is the opening for us all? Decide to be a true leader. Lead by example, allowing our teams to be at liberty in joining us. Horses are pure energy. They are pure love. When we decide to give our all and come from these loving encounters, we discover new ways to authentically communicate. We can also declare our own personal freedom. We can choose only to follow those who leave us at liberty to be the fully, enlivening, inspirited, loving energy that we are. We can release those who want to control, manipulate, pressure, and demand that we join uptheir way. We can feel worthy.
Horses are herd animals. The horses want to belong to the herd. So do the humans, truth be known. Dominant horses need true leadership. They will follow.
They want to belong. Herd leaders will not let dominant horses become as violent as we have, historically, allowing our governing bodies to be brutal and cruel. Herd leaders hold their dominant horses in check. If their dominance is a threat, herd leaders will cast them out. Our United States of America’s bullying mentality is coming more and more to light as a result of this recent election and new governing bodies. Under this new regime, former FBI and Republican appointed counsel Robert Mueller was asked to do a probe to determine if Trump was (and still is) actively involved with the Russians, harming our elections and democracy. Mueller is acting as leader and he is ousting dominant, bullying, unethical, illegal criminals who threaten our cherished Democracy.
In July, at the1980 Black Hills International Survival Gathering, Russell Means spoke from his heart. He moved me deeply. He contributed to my beliefs as well as to my dissertation work. I also agree with him.
If America is to be a democracy and melting pot, as it was envisioned, it needs to have all the voices at the lead table. We need a leadership that allows us all to be present in egalitarian ways. We need leadership that leads the herd forward, out into safe pastures, protecting our entire herd. We need governing bodies that reflect our various races, cultures, classes, genders, and sexual preferences. We need diverse contributions that open up new spaces for us to inhabit. We need “Lead Mares” and “Lead Stallions” from a various “herds” coming together to co-create a real democracy.
We are each born into a karmic conditioning society and family structure. What we do with this conditioning shapes us into the person we become. If we do not examine our core values, and extricate them from conflicting, and toxic, family and societal beliefs, our minds become habituated, rigid, and inflexible. We act out someone else’s antiquated history and karmic ways. We then are merely conditioned egos moving sluggishly through time and space. Someone at the Black Hills International Survival Gathering transcribed Russell Means’ speech, commemorating it for all time, for all of us.
Russell Means helped me question the ethics that shaped American laws and military actions. When I questioned them, I found them not in keeping with my core values. Russell Means eloquently describes how the impact of the domineering “human horse” and colonization harmed our democracy and shared culture. His voice sung in the air at the 1980 Black Hills International Survival Gathering and leaves its imprints in my evolution, even now:
It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain. It must come from the hoop, the four directions, and the relations. It cannot come from the pages of a book—or a thousand books.
No European can ever teach a Lakota to be Lakota, a Hopi to be Hopi. A Master’s Degree in "Indian Studies" or in "education" or in anything else cannot make a person into a human being or provide knowledge into traditional ways. It can only make you into a mental European, an outsider.
The process began much earlier. Newton, for example, "revolutionized" physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics.
Each one of these "thinkers" took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended: they "secularized" Christian religion, as the "scholars" like to say--and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture.
Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer!
This is what has come to be termed "efficiency" in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment--that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one--is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why "truth" changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive.
Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain.
Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is "proof that the system works" to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is very far over to the other side from the American Indian view. But let's look at a major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate.
The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it.
Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it alright to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, "Thou shalt not kill," at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.
Like Russell Means, Standing Sioux Tribe, the environmentalists, Jane Goodall and Martin Luther King, Jr., Michael Meade sees an America which is in trouble. Michael Meade sees the tragic deeds that played out in the 2016 presidential campaign. He sees a critical moment of our suffering. He sees the need for us to take a stand for our core beliefs and act on them. Michael Meade says it this way:
Faced with tragedy or loss, a person or a society either grows a greater vision or becomes diminished at the level of the soul. In tragic times we either become wiser and more compassionate or else become bitter and more rejecting of life.
In these troubled times we need more of the third level of understanding that brings a deeper commitment to a future that is more genuinely humane, more fully inclusive, more dedicated to justice than to greed and more able to find ways to balance the needs of both nature and culture.
The United States of America’s governing body was clearly founded by white men who implemented policies blinded by their class privilege, gender, and racial biases. They, over the course of history, executed laws and policies which left a lot of people with little or no access to the “ American pie”, including designing its allocation. There are flaws in the structure of our governing body and its designs which cause and create institutionalized poverty and treacherous living circumstances. Indigenous cultures are well aware of, and intimately know, personal wounds of deprecation, diminished self-esteem, and being devalued culturally. All marginalized people know this damning and damaging dynamic, and they internalize these negative beliefs. Poverty and coping strategies, like alcoholism and drug abuse, mask post-traumatic stress injury. We, as a nation, are very slow to acknowledge that we placed Japanese citizens into internment/prison camps. These wounds continue to injure native peoples, lands, and tribal communities. United States of America internments have been perpetrated upon Germans, Italian-Americans, Native Alaskans, Vietnamese, and during the Afghan war. We impacted many other cultures as well, utilizing “doctrinarian” education, rape, and violence so brutal that few of us can bear learning of the cruelty.
What more can we say today, as children whose parents are seeking asylum from corrupt governments are placed in cages if they come onto American soil seeking asylum, refuge, and sanctuary. We are denying loving touch, connection, hope, and humanitarian values as we cage children, their parents, and elders. We yank babies and children from their mothers and fathers, we violate these babies and children, and we “officially” lose them without any hope of being reunited with their families.
When all non-caucasian children feel validated, are proud of their cultural roots, and are welcomed and honored into a true American Democracy, we will begin the slow task of healing these rifts among us. For this to happen, we each need to uproot our own misguided white nationalism—nationalism at the expense of “other” Americans. Our educational systems can evolve into exploring empathic, inclusive cultures with equality for all. Students from all races, classes, genders, sexual preferences, nationalities, religions, and spiritual orientations can co-create a future that is inclusive of us all. THAT is real education.
“White” institutions need to stop “white-washing” other cultures until they no longer know their own face. We all need to stop “downloading” primitive values, and electing officials with ties to white supremacy paradigms. When Russell Means, John Trudell, and Michael Meade are speaking...when Martin Luther King, Hildegard, and Mother Theresa are speaking...I hear their clear voices inviting us to “see” the possibility of a truly equitable future. We need to keep waking each other up. We need communication practices that help us co-create real futures, blessed in shared partnership. Authentic Organizational Change is about shifting the conversation. Inspiring people like Russell Means shared a new worldview to those of us in attendance at the 1980 International Black Hills Survival Gathering. Russell’s words continue to ring out into my heart and inform my life steps:
In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to "developing" a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth, itself, removed.
But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be "developed" through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open--in the European view--to this sort of insanity.
It is the role of American Indian peoples, the role of all natural beings, to survive. A part of our survival is to resist. We resist, not to overthrow a government or to take political power, but because it is natural to resist extermination, to survive. We don't want power over white institutions; we want white institutions to disappear. That's revolution.
White is one of the sacred colors of the Lakota people--red, yellow, white and black. The four directions. The four seasons. The four periods of life and aging. The four races of humanity. Mix red, yellow, white and black together and you get brown, the color of the fifth race. This is a natural ordering of things. It therefore seems natural to me to work with all races, each with its own special meaning, identity and message.
Russell Means
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