 Debbie Daschinger and welcome to Dare to Dream. Exciting stuff because today's show features John P. Milton who is a meditation and Qigong instructor, author and environmentalist. John is the founder of Secret Passage and The Way of Nature. He pioneered vision questing in contemporary Western culture in the 1940s. Well, I usually tell you about Dare to Dream and the awards that I've won and all of that. And that's lovely. You could hear that in another video. But what I want to tell you is three to five months from the time that this airs, you'll be able to see me on Gaia TV, interviewed on the Beyond Belief Show. And then coming up, I'm going to be interviewed on Coast to Coast with George Noory. So taking my message way further and doing the things that I teach you guys about also coming up. I'll be speaking in Glastonbury, UK in September 2024. And then on a spiritual cruise where you can hear amazing transformational people speak. And in the upcoming episodes, I'm going to start giving out the link. They only have so many places, Capn's on the boat. It's a celebrity cruise. So it's going to be all that. And I'll be speaking there as well. So I love you to join me on the spiritual cruise and just wait for next week when I'm going to be giving out the live link. This show is sponsored by Dr. Dane Here and Access Consciousness. They do energy work in the world. If you'd like to join them, you can go to drdanehere, H-E-E-R dot com. I'm Debbie Daschinger. And you know what I do. I help you with your books to take it from the inception of the idea to the finished publishing of it. Also, once your book is complete, I've got a company that guarantees I'll turn your book into an international bestselling book. And finally, I show you how to be interviewed on radio and podcasts and get massive results. You can learn how now. You can do all of this yourself. Let me teach you free gift for you. Go to debbiedaschinger.com slash gift. And there I give you templates, videos, and I teach you how it's D-E-B-B-I-D-A-C-H-I-N-G-E-R dot com slash gift. My guest, John P. Milton is a pioneering ecologist, spiritual teacher, meditation master, vision quest leader and shaman. John's vision quest and shamanic work began in the mid 1940s after experiencing his first vision quest at the age of seven. Since the 1950s, John has guided thousands of people into the wilderness, sharing with them experiences and practices that cultivate a profound connection with nature and ultimately source awareness. Over the years, many have sought his profound transmissions and powerful yet gentle Qigong teachings, Tai Chi training, meditation practices, internal alchemy training, shamanic practices, and sacred passage programs. John continues to lead wilderness trainings and many of the earth's wild and sacred places. Through way of nature, he offers nature quests, sacred passages, advanced awareness trainings as well as custom programs and retreats for individuals or groups. You can learn more by going to wayofnature.com. And with that, I welcome John P. Milton to Dare to Dream. It's so great to have you. Wonderful to be here. Thanks. So gentlemen that I know for a couple of years now, I see him at events all the time and we've become kind of acquaintances. When he's been on this show, great guy Matthew James Bailey was finishing his interview on my show. A bit of time ago, last year, and he said, I just feel like you should meet and interview John P. Milton. I feel so strongly about it. And I really trust Matthew. So this is how we got connected through our mutual friend. Yeah, Matthew's wonderful. He's working in a very important field right now developing an ethical foundation for AI. Yeah. Yeah, he's changed my life a bit too because he's opened my mind to using it in very ethical ways. And I do in my business. It's been wonderful actually. Very, very, very helpful. And there's so much about who you are, John. And first I want to start, just the audience knows this amazing background that we're looking at. Tell us where you are right now. I'm in the middle of the desert in southern Baja, California, the area near La Paz, maybe a couple of hours away from La Paz. And I've been running retreats here for going on 30 years with the whales. We have a male whale migration with up back gray and blue whales coming through. But I put people on retreat here in the winter months. And so it's been kind of a home for me in the winter time each year. You know, I've been coming here for about three years. And so you've pioneered for Western civilization this really unique way of spiritual development through nature. And that creates a communion with all species and with Gaia, with Mother Earth. Where did that training stem from? What teachers or lineages did you experience to get you to where you are right now? Well, the first and probably the most primary teacher was nature itself. And as a young child, I began asking my parents and grandparents, and we lived on a farm in northern New Hampshire. And I asked them to let me go out and spend some time alone in nature because I was so passionate about it. And I began asking for that around four. And then finally they said, well, maybe next year, try to get it five, six. I said, nope, yeah, we have to wait a little bit longer. And finally at eight, seven, they said, okay, you can go out. And it was fairly short period of time, only five nights and days. But going out there when I went into a place that I was very fond of near our farm in the forest, I ended up seeing the animals coming in from the forest. And I had quite a circle of different kinds of animals joined me during that five day period. They really became like close friends, companions. And I felt like I was initiated into the big family of all living things at that time. It really changed my life. And I've been sharing that experience ever since. Wow. I love the idea of being surrounded by animals. And birds. And birds, yeah. It just feels like an initiation. It's interesting, you know, I'm sure you know to become a shaman, it's often a very difficult path, a true shaman. And there is definitely at least one initiation. Usually it's a near death experience or a mental crisis or you're struck by lightning or you have a psychic trance and you meet an animal face to face that's fierce and it dismembers and eats the shaman and then blows it back into being. Sometimes it's not that quick. And when it blows it back into being, it then becomes the shaman's protector and tutor. And I had a very profound animal experience too. That didn't include dismemberment, but there is no doubt it's my spirit animal. And I'm wondering if any of what you experienced back then at that young, young age, have any of those animals step forward to become your ongoing spirit animal, your tutor and protector? Well, Bear has been a very consistent partner through the years. And I've continued to have many experiences with black bears, grizzly bears, in both in the States and up in Alaska and Northern Canada. I did a lot of expeditions in the Arctic in my earlier years, but I'd say Bear is one of the big ones. And I was struck by lightning and gild and then brought back to life later after six hours. At what age? I was 1984. Wow. And what were the circumstances? I had just been asked to dedicate a sacred site for a good friend, he had about a thousand acres near in your worst borough of New York, New York State. And so I went up and did the ceremony for him to kind of officially honor it as a sacred site for contemporary humans. And I came back after doing the ceremony and began to get ready to spend the evening alone in my, I had a little rental unit that I was staying at. And a lightning bolt came through the window. And the only thing I remember is it was around midnight, 11 to 12, somewhere in there. The only thing I remember is the sound of a tremendous explosion. A thunderbolt sound. It felt like it was shredding the universe. Wow. And it took me into the, I'm sure you've heard of the classic experience spring, but into the tunnel, the jar tunnel, shot through the tunnel alone. There's nobody there with me and shot through the tunnel and I could see a light at the end and then I shot into that light which appeared to be, once I entered it, my sense of individuality merged with this light which is very clear and very, very bright. And I remember for about six hours, I know that because when I came back, that's what time it was, six hours later. And when I came back, I was brought feet first, kind of each birth back into a human form again. And it felt like I was reassembled at that point. And I still had my eyes fixed on the star there or the light that now became something like a star. And when the tunnel, walls of the tunnel, dissolved in my, it was back in the human form, I saw that the star I was looking at was actually the planet Venus, the morning star. Do you think there is some connection for you with Venus? Well, Venus is a very profound planet. There seems to be something about that that is really profound. I don't have any theories, but that was the experience and I felt like the merging with clear light and the reality of Venus itself, there's some kind of a connection there. It's very interesting. I mean, it makes me want to pause and race over to Google and look up the Venusian people. I don't know what your feeling is about extraterrestrials and all that, I am deep in that world and much of a believer and an experiencer. And so I know there are Venusian peoples that makes me wonder just as an offhand comment what your connection might be or if they're lineage. And may I ask you, John, when you came back after six hours, quite a dramatic experience, was there anything physical happening for you? Like, did you need a lot of help after that in recovering? And also, did you come back with gifts shamanically? Well, you could probably ask my students about the gifts, but there was no damage. Wow. It felt looking back on it now, it felt like it was an initiatory experience that was meant to give me a direct introduction into source. Yeah. So it would just be a theoretical concept. And since then I've been focusing on my teachings. I really are focused on helping people make a deep connection with other living things, the rest of the life system of the planet and the planet itself as a living being. And then inner nature, which is of course the whole combination of perceptions and experiences. I call it the makeup of non-experiential fields of sight and sense and taste and smell and touch, movement, energy comprehension and emotions and thoughts. All that matrix makes up the experience of this lifetime. So, and we call that in a way of nature, the inner nature reality. And then of course there's the source nature, which is the foundational state of clear and open consciousness, which is foundational to all of the other processes that we experience in life. All the forms manifest in that context. So a lot of my teachings are about helping connect with the outer inner and true nature. And how do your experiences with shamanic work and the vision quests inform the spiritual aspects of your work? Well, one of the beautiful things that happens on this path where you honor all of life as sacred is that you begin to see that many living beings can bring very profound teachings and even methodologies for attaining spiritual growth and cultivation. In the shamanic pathway, we honor all living beings as having immense capacity and wisdom. Yeah. When you merge and integrate with the energy of these beings, they bring gifts of deep insight and wisdom. And then of course that wisdom begins to flow through you if you really receive the initiatory process that that totem has brought to you. We kind of specialize in totemic process in a way of nature. Can you explain that more? Well, you've heard the word totem, I'm sure. Yes, absolutely. Wolves and BC and that kind of thing. That really represents how beings of nature when you begin to go through a process of deeper connection, then the opportunity or the invitation goes out as a human. You're not seen as one of these humans that's completely caught up in self-referencing with their whole life. They're more open to a type of referencing which connects more with sourcing with many other forms of life. And when that begins to happen, a number of invitations often show up. And in my case, and I had a number of early invitations from different life forms and began to learn from the connection to them. In our process, what I train people in is how to go through the process of first learning the type that most of us are not connected to the rest of life. Or instead of disconnection, especially as we live mostly in cities. And so we, using these approaches that we've developed over the years, which are essentially shamanic, you go through a process of reconnection and then once you've established a reconnection, you begin to go deeper with that and establish an experience of actual communion where you're still you, there's still the other being of nature but you're in a state of very deep connectivity. Then you go deeper with the community experience and open up an experience of unity where you and the being of nature are essentially one being. There's no separation between you and the other being of nature. And that's all done without the help of plant medicine. It's silver. Not necessarily. Beautiful. Wow. That's right. Beautiful. Okay, I have a couple of questions that came up while you were sharing that. I'm really moved by what you're saying and I wanna first ask you about your relationship. Clearly you have this very profound connection with all things nature, all animals, plants, trees. Does that extend as far as rivers, the Apus, the sacred mountains, the sky, everything? Very much in fact, one of the things we have nature is doing right now is we're beginning to establish sacred sites in nature as contemporary places which are considered sacred by modern humans and where we honor the rights of nature itself. Yes. Bring back the rights of a river to own itself, the rights of a place to own itself, the rights of different animals and plants to own themselves and their own sovereignty. And we have a place called the Sacred Land Sanctuary in Crestone, Colorado, where a fairly large chunk of land north of the town of Crestone has been dedicated to this process. And many of her issues are held there. And so the field effective creating that kind of space and then what happens with nature, how it reciprocates when people come there is just amazing. It's a welcoming because once you begin to have this kind of intention, all of nature kind of goes in the spirits of nature, go, wow, these are really different kinds of humans. Wonderful, they want to connect, they want to be, go into a deep experience of being part of big family of all living things. This is really special. And so they're embraced and honored and they have experiences that are far more profound if they were just going out into a regular place in nature where that kind of cultivation did not occur. And do you, in your relationship with all of nature, do you, what does that look like? What does that feel like, sound like? Do you actually talk? Do you have to go into meditation to connect? What kind of information do you receive or direction? Talk more deeply about what this is for you because it seems to me that you're actually a voice and a guide, maybe the plants even gave you that job before you came here. And you said, yes, that you are a mouthpiece and an action force for them. So what is that like for you, your engagement? Well, it kind of goes back to that early quest at age seven. I began speaking with my parents very early on about the fact I was here to help people be more happy and begin to have a better relationship with plants, the animals and the earth itself. But I clearly came in with a mission and that's just been refined over the years. And I've combined that early knowing of what I was here for with training and things like Zogchen, Taoist internal alchemy, non dueled by the violence from the Hindu tradition and various shamanic lineages like the Bunpo lineage of Tibet and also several Native American traditions. And so a lot of this has sort of helped me to find the common ground of connection to outer inner and true nature of different cultures and different pathways and to see where these common ground principles, what they are and how they function as a whole. And then to come up with practices that also fit in beautifully with those core principles of cultivation. And part of the idea there is to have a pathway that you can travel without having to be part of a specific lineage from the past and also have a pathway that helps you see other pathways or also powerful and profound because you can begin to see. We all share common paths who are a particular lineage that others share as well. So it takes away that competitive who's got the best pathway kind of perspective when you're based on a common ground. Yeah, it's incredible for me to hear you talking about this is the way of healing because something that I talk about is my unique point of view is that shamanism is the way to heal the planet and heal humanity. Humanity, the planet, Gaia don't need saving, they need loving and they are living, breathing entities, they are powerful entities. And so when I'm being interviewed or I'm talking on stage about this and people are saying, well, what do we do from here? And for me, it's about adopting more shamanic ways of being and what I mean specifically is this reverence of the mountains, the river, the earth, the animals, the sky, the moon, everything, understanding it is alive. It's been here a lot, lot longer than us. It has tremendous wisdom. And rather than doing things out of greed and control and a lot of what corporations do, et cetera, and things for money is to turn that around. So how do you see what you do and what you know in relationship to these things in nature? How do you see the way forward, John, to healing people, humanity at this very interesting time and also the planet at this very interesting time? Well, if we begin to embrace nature as a partner and all the beings of nature as part of a bigger family, we start to have a different relationship and we are open to learning from nature and especially learning those things that can help bring us back into balance and harmony and a better integrated state with the rest of life. We obviously face massive challenges in the degradation of ecosystems and the pollution of the planet everywhere, problems like mining and loss of the oceans even with all the plastic pollution that's taking place there. If you take a look at each of the natural systems of the planet, and I, as a young man, I studied deeply in ecosystem ecology because that seemed to be the science that most best described how humans and the rest of life were part of that big family experience that I had as a young kid. That science seemed to describe that and the relationships very deeply. And we've learned through ecosystem ecology that it's not just climate change, it's also these massive impacts from certain kinds of pesticides that poison the soil, every living thing in the soil or besides that do much the same thing to plants. The release of novel toxins that we have no idea what those new chemicals are doing except they probably are not being helpful in that they're being released into the environment on a massive scale. So if we're going to have the insight and the wisdom to heal this kind of situation, it's the kind of truth. We need to make a connection with the basis of life itself and be open to learn from life and not put ourselves on the top of the pyramid of living things as the beings that know it all and have all the answers. We actually need to take the opposite view that we've screwed up pretty badly. We need to be much more humble about what we've done and all the mistakes that we've made and take another look at how we can establish the connections of the fundamental wisdom of nature and the beings of nature and learn from them. And that's a lot of what the way of nature does. So shamanic is a kind of a deep purpose behind it to help in the re-indigenization of the contemporary times. I never heard that word before, re-indigenization. Yeah, I had to kind of come up with it because I couldn't find a word that fit that. That's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, these very dismissed people actually have had some pretty profound answers all along. It's no accident that some of the most in tune and balanced peoples of the planet living in harmony with the rest of life have been the indigenous cultures because they had the vision quest, for example. Yes. And in the vision quest, and we do a modified version of this. Okay. You go out into nature and you go out alone for a period of time. It could be anywhere from a few days. Most vision quests were three or four or maybe as long as five days solitude. And you often wouldn't eat during that time, drink very little or not at all. You'd have no tent or no shelter. You'd stay within a very small circle of roughly three meters and you would pray and meditate and cry out for the vision that would give you the answers of, who am I really? What's this lifetime for? And what's this all about? It's lifetime, this life and this planet. And get the basic instructions for how to live your life. And that was often done in your teen years. So you've got the message of how to live a good life in balance with the rest of life. And tap into the creativity that would allow you to do that skillfully. We don't have anything like that in cultures anymore. So part of our job in the way of nature is to bring that back and provide the vehicle for re-accessing that universal wisdom that the indigenous peoples have always had because they had to. Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. The first, I was in a six month shamanic program. I'm in my third one right now, different teacher. But my first very extensive shamanic program it was recommended that we do a vision quest. And so I just want to be very honest with you. It's kind of a big trigger. I didn't do it because the idea of me as a woman being alone in the mountains. And honestly, I mean, the animals, it's more people. The concern of, I don't know, a man or a group of men coming along and I'm alone and all of that. So can you speak to that? I'm being very vulnerable right now. I feel called when I hear you share this that sounds, even at my age, like a very beautiful thing to do and quite a challenge but also the fact that what would you do in that circumstance if somebody could really know they were safe? Yeah, it makes a big difference to do a sacred passage or a nature quest which is the term we use now for a contemporary vision quest. It's a little bit different because you can't have a tent. We do recommend fasting gently using the master cleanse. Oh, wow. Complete solitude. You have no contact with humans during that time. Yeah. And you're able to have a larger circle of about 108 feet or meters depending on the sequence range. Because we do these in places where we have either agreements with the land owners or we actually own land ourselves guarantee solitude and nobody coming in to mess with you. Okay. And for example, I right now have close to a dozen people on beaches along the coast here in Bacau where each individual has their own little beach, their own little promontory looking at over the sea and they're just there with the sea lions and the pelicans and the whales and the dolphins. And we have a team of people that are making sure that the security of each of those camps is maintained. People don't have to worry about anything from the outside. And you're quite correct. I think humans are probably the most dangerous species. So with good cause, it's very important to have that really security. You don't have to worry about that. You can take the time and have the freedom to really take a deep dive into your truth, your deepest inner truth. Live there and abide in that with that fear or concern. What kind of profound things have happened for people doing this on your watch during a nature quest? I'd say, I often say to people, I have one of the best jobs on the planet. Cause I'm privileged to be able to see people go in with kind of weighted down with the burdens of life and wondering if they're going to be able to regain the magic and the beauty and the inspiration that they had as kids. And we're maybe in their early teens and twenties. And then these people, same people come out a week later. So we only, they only go out for roughly five to seven days of solitude in this way. In the front end and the back end, we focus on training and integration and sharing. So they come back from that week of solitude. I was just shining like an inner lamp that's going off with 10,000 watts shining from the inside. And then very often I'll get reports back even years later from people who say, John, you have no idea how my life was completely transformed by that one passage. I've heard that so many times. It's one of the most powerful processes of transformation on the planet, no question about it. And of course, we combine the solitary part. It's really only one part of the process. The first part is to honor the fact you already have a liberated essence and to honor that truly liberated essence of yourself is perfect. And the second part is to bring in authentic teachings from that common ground basis that also reconnect you to the big family of all living things, as well as to the source aspect of yourself. And then thirdly, we work with the power of transmission, not just from the human teacher, but from all the other species that are able to transmit deep levels of wisdom and insight and energy, sacred energy. And then fourth, we have that power of solitude where we can drop human culture for a little while, let that extremely powerful reality of the non-consensual reality dominated world begin to reach us. And when we drop all our ideas about how the world is, which you get during solitude, then vast new levels of creativity are unleashed and completely change your life with the good. And then there's that power of being in a sacred place in nature where these places like the sacred and sanctuary I mentioned in Crestown, where you've nurtured a sacred relationship with plants, the animals, the elements and the beings of nature. So when you go there, you're embraced by all life as a wonderful example of humans who are coming into a new kind of relationship with a big family of all living things. That's very special. So you have those five powers and then power of spiritual community when you come back out and share. Paradoxically, for a process like this that includes some solitude, it's one of the most bonding things you can do between humans because they've shared something so special, so deep. Amazing. Okay. Well, I am grateful to know that there's a group like yours for somebody like me who feels like that would be an important right of passage and it was not willing to do it on my own in a remote area, remote mountain here in Los Angeles. And I'm curious to know more about your shaman path. Can you deep dive with me about who did you study with? Some like reference points, important things that happened in your learnings, lineage, anything along those lines. I'm very hungry to hear that. Well, I was very fortunate to, when I was a kid, I think I had such a passion for the planet that I found blank spots on the map and decided to put together a simple expedition to go into the places that had on the map, unknown territory and explored. We still had such places when I was growing up. And so I ended up doing that in the last unexplored portion of the Northern Rocky Mountains in Canada. Cut into the, was the last human into the unexplored part of the Rockies by contemporary humans. And then I ended up in a relatively unknown area in Chiapas in Yucatan and lived with a Lakindon Maya elder who took me on as a student and spent a year with him in the rainforest. And he was my first indigenous teacher. How did they all react to you, white man coming into their territory? Did they respond negatively at first? Or did they, of course, they're very gifted people. Did they understand immediately who you were and the validity of you being there? Well, I think because the man who invited me to stay with him had that shamanic background. He was the leader of that particular group of Lakindon Maya. I think he could probably see better into the hearts of people than most. And so I think he could see in my heart there's real passion for being of service in a much deeper way than I guess most humans are these days. And probably that helped and is the exception of me as an apprentice, as a student. So that was a very early experience and I have so many things happen during that time I would have a hard time of sharing it all. But one of my students is now writing a biography about my lifetime. And we have three other hours of recording of adventure stories. And so I'm sure some of that's gonna come out in some fashion before too long. Another example- Anything remarkable about that time if you could give one example of something while you live with that Mayan shaman? Yes. One of the things that I still remember is I asked if he could show with me any places in the rainforest there that had any Mayan pyramids or any of the little temples of the Mayan people. And so he took me to a, as yet undiscovered by the outside world, Mayan city. I was as a young kid of 19 years old, found myself as the contemporary discoverer of a whole Mayan city that was hidden in the jungle. And then spending time there meditating there and doing spiritual practice there and eventually making sure it was protected by the Mexican government as a sacred site and not messed with. And may I ask, did you see this particular shaman do anything that was extraordinary, not of this realm that you can share? You seem to have an extraordinary control over the elements and that control was magnified with my work later on. Then the Himalayas, I went on to work in the Himalayas for about 15 years, helping set up national parks, while I preserved and helping preserve a number of important areas that were being destroyed. And during that time, I apprenticed to it, a teacher who followed the path of the divine mother, the goddess, especially in the form of Kali and Durga and a Bhagavan Mukti. And one time I was meeting with him to help him with taking a few pictures that would kind of preserve some of the power of where he lived and what he was doing with his life, which was extraordinary. He had a powerful impact on many people at that time in central Nepal, but was relatively unknown in the outside world. So I arranged to meet with him on top of a mountain where it was said that Shiva and Shakti first came together. And I remember I ran a little late. In those days, there were very few cars in Kathmandu and Bali. And I was saying, he was staying at a place called Pashapati Nath, which is where the god Shiva said to inhabit in the form of the god of all nature. And that's what it refers to, Pashapati Nath. So I was running a little bit late, came to the hill where I was supposed to meet him on that spot where Shiva and Shakti first came together were unified, symbolically. And he said, you're late. And I remember I said, yes, I'm terribly sorry. And he pointed over my shoulder at an uncoming storm that was good 30,000 feet high. It was the first major storm of the monsoon season. And the entire monsoon was coming at us. It was a pretty good clip, probably 23 miles an hour. And he lifted his hand up and in good English said, stop. And the entire storm rose in place. And the tentacles of the rain patterns and storm patterns just kind of wriggled almost like anacondas writhing in the air. And a yellow slight and a buzzing sound kind of came in and filled the small space. And I remember thinking, this must take an awful lot of energy. So in fact, into the hills of the cave where he lived and where I was studying with him. And maybe five minutes later, he strode in, said, why did you leave? And the moment he strode in first behind him, a wall of rain dropped like a waterfall. And a friend of mine came down to meet this man because he had been studying some of the techniques from the Buddhist community in Nepal but how to modify weather to bring rain if you need that or stop if there's too much. And these ceremonies often took up to a week to go through the whole of the mantras and the different visualizations that you have to do and the invocation of the appropriate gods and goddesses and so on and so forth. So he was interested in meeting my teacher and he came, so I invited him to come over and have a chat. And my teacher said, you know, he asked the question of how come you can do this when it takes a few of them I've been working with up to a week just to achieve a relatively modest polarization of the weather. And he said, well, you know, it's not about the ceremonies and the mantras and the practices. It's about whether you have deep devotion and love for the divine mother. And if you really have that in your heart, she will respond. That was a powerful lesson for him and for me. Absolutely. Why the divine mother? What was the connection there between the weather and the divine mother? Well, the weather is the manifestation of her body, the body of the divine mother of all the alms, the display of the alms. I've never heard that before. Sure. Fascinating. So to cultivate a relationship then with the divine mother, one of reverence, and then when you speak for the magic, you want to create and changing the weather, that is possible. So basically, his message was that if you have that kind of honest and authentic relationship, then of course, the divine mother, if you have a request or a need that you express, she's going to respond in a natural response. And in that case, the response was really to give me a teaching as well as my friend who was there for a brief chat. Probably in some ways it was more for me because I needed to hear that. And along the way, your path was shamanism. Have you had really extraordinary experiences where you were asked to do something to help you with your gifts and powers, to understand something, to cultivate nobility, et cetera. Can you share some of that? Well, of course, amazing things come along the way. I mean, every day, every week is filled with things for that sort. But a good example was some years ago, I had a student who was a leader in the field of bioregional cultivation. It was a movement to try to redraw boundaries within different countries, according to the natural boundaries as nature sets them. Natural systems set them like watersheds. And we were both working in this movement to try to get this kind of approach to how you draw boundaries and work with the natural systems of different parts of North America in that case. And so he came to me, he had an issue that was dealing with a shadow aspect and I agreed to work with him. So I put him out on a vision quest, a more strict vision quest than I usually do. And but I do occasionally do the classical vision quest as well as the sacred passage, it's a much more gentle form. And so he went out and asked for some strong medicine because his problem he was telling was a major one. Yeah, probably a health issue which needs some very radical cutting through the packages. And as I began to go back and said, okay, I'll do what I can. And I called on my experience with the lightning to come in and give me a bit of an assist. And he was up on the mountain side near Crestone, in the middle of the sacred land sanctuary that I mentioned. And this is very funny. He said, there is one thing I'd like to take in with me. I know I'm supposed to fast, but I would like to bring in one thing that would help me have a, the only thing I will eat is this, but no other food. I won't eat too much of it. And I said, what do you want to bring in? He said nachos and hot sauce. That tells you something about this character. Anyway, so I did a little ceremony to invoke my totem helper, the lightning bolt. And sure enough, I saw it to the west there's a rumble of a storm looked out over the valley, the San Luis Valley, the beautiful thunder storm with some lightning bolts coming down. We have a very beautiful view there up to a hundred miles out of the spaciousness of this valley, big view. And that storm was heading across the valley, right towards us. So I thought, oh, great, it's gonna get a gift. Then I went back to the cabin where I lived. I lived in a very simple little cabin with no plumbing, no electricity, no telephone, very simple life, 22-year retreat there during that period. And so then I heard another rumble. Then towards a place called Mount Blanca, which is a very sacred mountain. And another storm had formed. It over Mount Blanca and that was heading north, again, towards right towards us. And then a third rumble to the north. And there was another storm that had formed to the north and was heading south, right towards us. This is very unusual to have movement of storms going from the south to the north, from the west to the east and from the north to the south, all coming together right where we were. And then of course the fourth storm then began to rumble over the mountains to the east and that storm began to move from the east to the west. And is he somewhere in the middle of all of what's converging? He was in the precise middle of the four storms. Man. The fourth end of storms came together like that. And the continuous exchange of lightning occurred unlike anything I've ever seen. Wow. He was in the middle of it. So I ended up on my cabin floor. Please don't kill him. Please don't kill him. Please don't kill him. And thankfully he survived. But he completely wiped away his previous concerns. He got through all the blockages and he came out of completely transferring. But it was a radical therapy approach. John, was it the totem? Was it the storm and the lightning that did it that literally was able to remove that from him? Or was it his experience as a soul that altered him because of what happened? Both. It's the lightning both provided the heading through capacity that destroyed all consensual reality aspects that he was attached to that were actually causing his blockage. Amazing. So the lightning provided the means for him to have a completely new view of who and what he could be. And so he emerged as a brand new human. Wow. That is a dramatic story. Yeah. That kind of thing happens a lot in my election. Hey, if I work with you, I don't want to be, please don't call in the lightning, okay? That's my main tone, you know, sometimes I've helped. You can call in the bear. That's my guy. My sprite. That's a good story. So if you'd like to hear those sometimes. I would love, can you tell, because that when I was working, yeah, it was my first shaman. I was working with a Peruvian female shaman for about seven months and we'd meet out in the mountains and it was one of the last times we were working together and she was having me go into a cave and there was a lot of initiation things that occurred. And then before I left the cave, I was supposed to pick up some things and see some things and all of a sudden I felt this giant presence and I looked over and towering over me was this brown bear who opened its mouth and roared over me. I had no concern when it did that. I mean, in person that would have been different but it was in person and in that situation in my trance, if you will, I felt loved. I felt this creature is here for me and when it was done roaring and it got down on all fours, it made it itself abundantly clear that it was my protector and because I started walking and I was actually instructed, she didn't even know what was going on and she guided me through this and she instructed me to leave the cave. It would not leave my side. And so when I came out of this, I shared, she asked me some questions and I said, oh, and the most interesting thing happened and I expressed that to her and she said, really? I want you to look up a brown bear when you get home and just write to me what you find. And when I looked it up, I was really moved. First of all, going into it to be clear, if you had asked me what animal would be your totem? I mean, I might have said lion or crow or there are many animals I resonate with, never in my life would I have said a bear. But when I came home and looked it up and I saw its level of presence and protection and loyalty and I was so moved because my inner child was like, this is what I've been looking for all my life, is really this powerful feeling. So now I have an altar here and I have bear. I have bear medicine in many places. I even made clothing with the bear on it. So I keep it close. Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, bear is fantastic. And another recent story which might fit in here, I've been working with getting the way of nature out. Obviously we're in the midst, we humans are in the midst of a massive environmental and climate crisis as we were seeing here earlier on. And I was feeling that the way of nature process could play a major role in helping heal some of the disconnect that's the ultimate source of these problems we're having with nature and coming into harmony. And so the challenge was how can I more effectively build this spiritual community that gets this process up much more widely so it can be a benefit to much larger numbers of people in the program called the Wayshare program. Help do that. But anyway, in the midst of doing that, I was still looking for some deeper insight in how to go about this process. And I was sitting on one of my, oh, I should mention I'm sometimes called a stone shaman because I've discovered a number of archeological sites that are kind of novel for our time called stone meditation seats. We have several thousand of them in my home town, Preston. In our sanctuary, there is preserving these seats which have a heaven, earth connections that connect into the constellations and then down into the stone and into Mother Earth. And you sit on them and receive unique teachings shamanically that are unique to each one of the seats and each star system they're connected to. But that's a whole nother story that would take a while to get into that. Anyways, I'm one of those. And this is a kind of a brand new shamanic tradition for our modern time. Very few people know about this, although it was widely known back in the indigenous days when the indigenous peoples ruled the continent. So I was sitting on one of these seats and just enjoying a deep meditation or a rustle in the forest nearby. Out of the forest, it showed a beautiful bull ground, maybe unusually large timber wolf. The beautiful orange, orange and gray and white mixed to the fur, but it was particularly struck by the orange tinges to the fur, really beautiful. Came right over to me, right next to me, looked up into my eyes as I was sitting on the meditation seat. I looked over it like this and I said out loud in English, hi, how you doing? You're beautiful. And then he looked up at me and had absolutely beautiful golden brown eyes, just extraordinary. And we bonded through the eyes for maybe a couple of minutes, more than you would think. And as that was going on, I got the message back from him that I'm doing fine. You're lucky you're not doing too bad yourself. Something like that. And we bonded and there was something exchanged. And then we thought it was complete. He got up and moved off and disappeared in the other direction off in the forest and vanished. Part of what I received is what Wolf stands for, which is the power of spiritual community. It was upgraded to a whole new level. And since that time, the outreach capacity for the way of nature is going to grow on steroids. And I credit that shamanic encounter as a mortal process that kind of authenticated that that fulfillment. That's how the totem process works, it's an example of it. And how do you work specifically with your bare totem? Do you do anything to engage with it? To encourage it? Do you ask it for help? What does that, how does that manifest? It kind of depends on the situation. Relately, it's been kind of playful. For example, maybe area where I put people out in Southern Arizona. Very sacred mountain range. And it's a mountain range in the middle of a volcano. And so the energy has sort of an interesting kind of volcanic like almost like Maui or a place like that. And in combination with these beautiful forests and streams that flow through this sky island or forest up above it, it's kind of moist. So I was putting people out in that area and you have a camp there that we use. And I was going in to do some checks because we have a system where each day when you're on your solo part of the process, somebody is actually your buddy to check and see if you leave a sign, maybe a note in a cord, a little piece of rope. You tell them when not either the morning or the afternoon, the other person comes checks that, see if that note's been tied, make sure everything's okay. And then if it has not been tied, then very of your responsibilities go in and make sure that person is doing all right. They might have slipped on something or fallen or it's another way of providing security for people. So I was doing the checks for somebody. And as I went into the checkpoint to check on the nodded cord, I heard a sound in the forest. And then I looked up in a beautiful large bear, black bear, came up, hit it right towards me and then stopped when he sensed I was there. And then he turned to his right. There's some huge boulders there. He lined up on top of the boulders and then did a half an hour of stretching themselves out, doing stretches, flowing over the rocks almost like an otter in a stream. So fluid, so full of joy and happiness and just loving his time there. And I think loving the fact he was able to share such a joy of life experience with me was a huge gift. So our relationship has become somewhat playful like that. And it's not so much about trying to get something or anything of that sort. Got it. Yeah. I was camping in the Sequoias and went out with my partner for a day trip, really, really, really hot day. And I just, you know, camping, there's nothing kind of like that cabin you were talking about, except it's a tent. And so I just wanted to jump in a river and get cool and swim and get clean. And we found a place that was private. So we scrambled down these rocks and I was taking off my clothes and I was going to dive into the water when I heard a noise coming from the water. When I heard a noise and I turned around and I saw what I would typify as a teenage bear, definitely not a baby, but a teenage bear and definitely not an adult. And he was feet away from me. He was incredibly close. I know enough to wonder, is there a mama close by because I would wanna be very careful and cautious of that. So I carefully started to put my clothes and hiking boots together so I could carefully get back up the rocks. I didn't know what was gonna happen, but what was amazing was the bear had no interest. I was clearly not violent and posed no threat. Even though he was as close as he was, he just looked at me, looked at the river and he went into the river and started swimming. And it was actually beautiful and glorious because it's an enormous amount of weight, even a teenage bear, and to see him so happily, joyfully swimming in the river to get to the other side and actually doing the very thing I wanted to do, not having clothes on, getting cool, getting clean. And it was a significant moment and interestingly it was at least a year prior to having this bear totem experience in the psychic trance in the cave. So it's like these moments leading up to this. That's great. I carry that. Establishing a beautiful relationship. Yeah. Really beautiful. Thank you. And yours too, yeah. For people who are listening, people who are watching us on YouTube or Spotify, et cetera, and they would like to explore the way of nature, John, what advice, what guidance would you offer so they can begin their journey? Well, I think obviously on our website, we have a schedule of our programs and they range from very introductory types of things which we call renewal programs that are gonna be even as short as a day to a weekend, a long weekend on through the nature quest which are more usually five to nine days. And then the passage is more like a 12-day process. And then for those that wanna have a taste of, have a YouTube channel has extensive amount of material that's there for free, teachings and processes that hopefully are up for those that can learn and benefit from them. And then a podcast series that also provides could have been material just as a gift, I put that together during COVID feeling that I wanted to do something to help people going through that very difficult time. And it also, by the way, birthday, what we occasionally do, which is some advanced training programs. And I birthed a program that involved two years of steady shadow work, as well as techniques, common ground techniques to transform shadow aspects and then how to apply them to the physical body, to the energy body, the chakras and the brahins, the emotional body, the mental body which often helps to hold those patterns of shadow that then manifests in physical, energetic and emotional. And then the application to the ancestral patterns that flow through families and close community processes in our lives. And then finally looking into the cultural effects of social media and large cultural patterns that are picked up and are causing shadow aspects to amplify often. And finally the karmic traces that we carry from one life to the next. So we birthed a period of novel shadow work that we're still learning how to apply today and how to bring into a more popular outreach. And then after the two years of shadow work, we had a year of direct introduction to source approaches. And then a year of what's called in Taoism, Uwe, where you learn how to flow in a state of continuous connection to source no matter what's going on externally. Boy, can people use that right now. So that's a longer training that we just finished the first four years of. So we do that kind of thing as well as these regular messages and nature quests and take a deep dive into some of the areas like energy cultivation, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Shumai cultivation using some of the techniques from indigenous cultures and specialized courses sometimes for people that would like to take a little deeper dive into certain facets of what we have to offer. More recently I've been developing a personal passion which is I love photography and the visual arts. So I've been working on developing a program with one of my students, who's a really wonderful artist. She lives in Tuscany and we've been developing an approach to take the way of nature process and apply it to opening up connection to source that then would be opening a well where it created inspiration to flow more fluently and also to bring through a kind of inspiration that allows a bonding with nature in the painting or photography. And of course in photography, one of the things I love is bringing together through cultivating the connection of the senses, the connection that we have with these things, these ways that we experience life through the five senses and energy comprehension and movement to help them all come together around something that's being sensed and then being able to feel that connection to source at the same time as you return to source those senses. And then there's a moment that comes that I call the click, the moment where everything comes together and it's perfect. And at that moment, the click happens for the camera or the inspiration happens for the brush to move in a certain fashion. So a lot of it's around that kind of creativity and that's bringing through that kind of creative context. So the way of nature process can be applied to many situations from helping an individual break through have a major breakthrough and a stuck pattern in life to helping organizations enhance their creativity in their coming into a much more sustainable relationship with what they're doing with the family of life to some of these interesting things like working with creativity in the audience. And that is wayofnature.com. Yes. Wayofnature.com. And John, this is Dare to Dream. What are you next, Dare to Dream? What are your future dreams and goals? Well, probably the main driving dream is to see the way of nature process, having experienced how profound the benefits are for a relatively limited number of people. I mean, I probably only worked with maybe, I don't know, 25 to 50,000 people directly over the past 40 years. And that's great for those folks, but we're in a time when the planetary crises are upon us in a big, massive way. And we must go through a shift as a species into a much better relationship with the rest of life. It's now reached a survival issue for us, not just for the planet. The planet will be fine probably, but it's more a question for us, what kind of humans are gonna survive into the future? So this, I'd say the main dream is to see it scale up so it can be a much greater service to a much larger community and help in the service spring. We'll see she's back into greater harmony with the big family of all living things. Amen. Really. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Great pleasure. Good to hear of your shamanic work. It's wonderful. I love those bear stories. I'm deep on the path, working with another teacher and yet another in May. So for me, people like you out in the world, lighting the way, holding the lamp, it gives me great hope. Thank you for the work you do. Thank you. And I end today's show with this quote from EM Forster. What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind if they do not enter into our daily lives? Subscribe to this number one transformation conversation, the weekly Dare to Dream podcast. Leave a comment. I read them all. Next week on the show, I'm going to be featuring the amazing Marie Diamond. She's star of the TV show Feng Shui Your Life and bestselling author. She was featured in the worldwide phenomenon, The Secret. Marie merges quantum physics, Feng Shui and meditation to help you attract financial success, good health, long lasting relationships and spiritual growth. Thank you so much for joining us today. And I hope one of your big takeaways is how you can start communing and creating a relationship with all of nature. It is truly profound when you start. Be stronger than your excuses, even if it means for five minutes every day you go out and put your feet in the grass and connect with the greatest mother of all, Mother Earth.