I believe in the healing power of color. I believe it helps us to face hard moments in soft ways. Color is grace. Color is comfort. It’s power. Color is also disquiet. Unpredictability. And at times, color can even feel distasteful or ugly. Color is both opulence and poverty, bright and dull, light and shadow. Color is a reflection of everything, just as we are.

In an instant, color can change how we feel about anything from furniture and living spaces to businesses and even our own bodies. Color formulates our opinions before we have even consciously acknowledged that we’ve formed an opinion at all. If you want to change the energy of anything in your life, all you have to do is change its color. . If you were to pause for a moment and think about how color affects you and your body, I invite you to consider this:

• Which colors feel protective?
• Which feel nurturing?
• Which colors help you to soften?
• Which colors make you feel powerful?
• Which exude grace?
• Which colors incite laughter and play?
• And which encourage your generosity

There are very few things we can control right now if anything at all. Life is extremely unpredictable and unpredictability makes the nervous system uncomfortable. Discomfort is food for fear and fear, my friends, is feasting.

I believe we can disarm our fears with color. We can prevent it from languishing in our chests, and from leaving its sediment in our bones. We can protect our spirits from fear just as a raincoat protects our body from the rain. Raincoats don’t ever stop the rain from falling. They don’t change what’s happening outside of us, they just change our experience with it.

Color may not be the cure to this virus but it can serve as a remedy for the fear. I’d like to invite you to make your own color palette and uncover your own color medicine. Once we learn which colors mean something to us, we can then begin to surround ourselves with those colors consciously. Consciousness is co-creation, and I can think of no better time than now to co-create a world we’re ready to live in.

Eyes open, hearts aware.
Jamie

You can access a free downloadable pdf chart to help you start this process.

Color Medicine printable PDF | B&W Color Medicine printable PDF

Color Medicine, Jamie Homeister

Color Medicine PDF

Color Medicine printable PDF

Color Medicine PDF

B&W Color Medicine printable PDF

Why do celebrations matter? 

1) They gather community in comfort.
When you celebrate, you give joy to what is and was. What could be more comforting than bearing witness to happiness?

2) Celebrations create a spotlight that refracts.
When we take a moment to highlight someone else’s achievements, that light emits outwards and highlights other successes and good deeds in a new way.

3) They create a transition point.
From a Shamanic perspective, celebrations are a necessary component of growth. They are a rite of passage; a time stamp for the soul to put to rest the challenges overcome and helps to prepare for the next stage of learning. It’s like a big, joyful goodbye surrounded in a warm, welcoming hello.

4) Lastly, celebrations create a memory of feeling one's importance.
A healthy celebration gives us the gift of a memory we can call back on where we felt wholly witnessed and honored.

 Celebrate yourself. Celebrate your community. Show up for both because it matters. 

I was gifted a vision yesterday while holding a friend of mine deep in my heart. In this vision, I was taken to an ethereal and foggy land. I scanned the horizon line looking for something to stand out, something familiar. It only took a moment before I saw her, Grandmother Spirit, nested in the wisps of clouds. She waved at me and motioned to join her.

As I approached, I noticed that she had situated herself before a large hole dug through the cloud cover. I peeked through its center; galaxies spun, planets moved, and stars shone as bright as our sun. Grandmother Spirit surprised me by branding a fishing pole. With a flick of her wrist, she cast its line sending the hook into the infinite cosmos below.

“What are you doing?” I asked curiously.

“Fishing for hope.” She replies. “Just as we fish for compliments, for problems, for troubles and strife; just as we fish for what’s heavy, overbearing, and familiar, so too can we fish for possibility. Hope is a holding space so that the goodness of life can move in and touch our hearts.”

“Is that what we need?” I ask. “Hope?“ She nods.

“Do you remember in the beginning of your spiritual journey when you could only perceive what was frightening and scary at first? When spiders and snakes were ominous instead of medicine? It took time for you to see the positive. Just as a river carves a canyon from a mountain and a stream smooths a stone, so too must your experiences create change in you so hope can flow like sacred water.”

She reeled in her fishing line and held up her catch: a ‪small, shadowed mass‬ hung lifeless from the hook. After inhaling deeply, she and blew. The black scattered like ashes caught in the wind. No longer darkened and no longer weighted, a bright, shiny star glistened and danced on the line. Grandmother looked at me and grinned with the joy of a five-year-old. She was quite proud of herself. And I couldn’t help but return her smile.

Throughout my life, I have become burdened with the weight of my experiences. Just as my bones gained in density, so too did my energetic system become weighed with my unresolved memories and emotions. We can hold Hope like a container, but first, we need to be hollowed. This is what can make the transformational spiritual journey so painful.

Muscle memory is the ability to reproduce a particular movement without conscious thought and built upon frequent repetition. Behaviors and thought patterns become embedded in this same manner. The seeker striving for healing becomes witness to the restrictive, the painful, the repressed, oppressed, and sodden spaces within in subconscious. My liberation had to be earned through my willing participation. In my own experiences, there has been no free-pass given.

Hollowing of the self only occurs by the light of consciousness: conscious thought. Conscious action. Conscious change. We can all be conduits of Hope. We all have it in us to see the eye and the storm, the light and the heavy, the star, and the shadow. My own hollowing wasn’t so that I could witness the positive first, but rather, to carve out space within me so that all expressions of the experience have space to exist. And no matter how scared or uncomfortable I feel, I can ground myself in the moment with an unwavering steadiness that only time and experience brings and know that sometimes all it takes is a few, deep exhales to let Hope shine.

Be love, loves.

I had a dream where I was standing in the middle of a drumming circle observing the layout around me. Out of the twenty chairs present, all were empty except for two which were occupied by a pair of enormous Anglerfish. Both looked equally grotesque with the odd combination of translucent skin and opaque eyes, and even though their bite was closed, an impressive set of sharp, pointed teeth that seemed taller than the height of their body was on full display.

By their nature, Anglerfish attract their prey by a large, fleshy growth from their heads that acts as a lure. In my dream, on the end of each antenna were the smallest of lights that shone quite brightly in the darkness, but it was only when I viewed it from another angle did I see that the light was made of a jelly and acted as a mask to hide a little hook inside of it.

Both fish remained stationary, completely immobile except for their lighted lures which whipped wildly from side-to-side as though they were searching for something, anything, to feed off of.

Despite the fact that these two fish were absolutely ferocious-looking, I would walk around each undetected, passing through their gnashed jaws and marveling at how something could be so blind to the world and so transparent to others, but still, somehow manage to get exactly what they wanted. I was completely and utterly confused by them.

"But they are supposed to be guardians," I said out loud. "Why are they so fearsome?"

An elder appeared at that moment, a little old lady wrapped up in layers of clothing and a staff in her hand. She wore the hide of a spotted animal draped around her shoulders with two braids parted on either side. She took her staff and stilled the antenna of one, pointing to the little light that shone brightly at the end, saying,

"A light is still a light. Only the soul gets to decide how it's used." And with the thud of her staff connecting to the ground, I woke.