Pictured here is my tree guide, Franklin, with whom I like to breathe and connect each day. When I am breathing with Franklin, I often receive peace and connection, resting in community with him and the web of life. Sometimes I receive deep insight and transformation, and although sometimes the work I am called to do in response to what is shared is challenging for me, I receive great compassion and wisdom from Franklin in support of what I am called to do.

Recently, I’ve been exploring my fears, asking for help. Through connection with Franklin, loved ones (human beings) and my other guides, I gain greater and greater insight into my fears and the process that happens inside of me related to fear. First I began to be able to notice my fear, and bring it into conscious awareness, and watch my fear, noticing how my physical state of being changes when I am experiencing fear. This helps me to stay with myself, rather than identifying with the fear and becoming overwhelmed with the discomfort in my body, including closing down and protecting my heart, that I create as a response to fear. As I’ve shared with a couple of human beings, dear loved ones, regarding my experience, they shared of their insights – thoughts about or experiences of fear, revealing and working through untruths, courageously stepping into and facing this process, and how in one moment, many energies and truths of the moment are present and the denser energies can shapeshift into another form through bringing in insight and love.

Earlier this week, when I had many fears popping up, one after the other, I took some time to do a shamanic journey and work with my guides to tune in to what was happening for me. What became revealed is that each one of the fears I’ve been experiencing recently was connected to a painful experience I had in the past. A common thread was revealed through my journey – a voice kept coming forward about how I had abandoned myself in each of these painful experiences. In each experience, I had chosen to identify with the untruth, the pain, the projection, or the disconnection, rather than staying with myself and the truth of myself as love and light manifest into form. As I see this, I see how when fears arise, I can feel my fear, identify the untruth (creating friction and discomfort), and then go deeper than the untruth into the truth of who I am. This deep well of truth and love is vast and expansive, full not only of forgiveness for myself and other, however also of possibility.

In this awareness, I can welcome fear, for it brings the opportunity for deepening into myself and my light, and learning how not to project my fears outside of myself. The truth is that I am and each one of us are love and light, spirit manifest into being. This is a beautiful marriage between spirit and form within each one of us, and between each one of us and all that is. My experience with the trees is that they are wise teachers, having had a longer life here in “Earth School” than we human beings. Through their connection with all of life, fully feeling and experiencing themselves as and giving their gifts in service to the web of life, they trust in abundance and the ways of nature and all that is, and they share this possibility with us human beings and all of life.