by Dr. Alberto Villoldo: In the North direction of the Four Winds medicine wheel we experience hummingbird medicine and our divine nature…
Maybe you wonder if a hummingbird is powerful enough to help us through all that is going on with us, our families, and the world. After all, the other directions are represented by predators: jaguar, serpent and eagle. Wouldn’t something big and scary like a pterodactyl be more fitting?
But hummingbirds are amazing creatures and their journey is the medicine. Hummingbirds feed from the sweetest nectar of life. They don’t stay comfortable and warm and safe in a sweet little nest they made for themselves. They are called to make an epic journey and they go! They don’t say maybe when I retire, grow bigger wings, or get enough miles to upgrade to business class. They just go when called.
We can embody and experience hummingbird medicine by embracing the three mystery teachings of the North direction. The first mystery teaching is INVISIBILITY. It is said that the high shamans are so utterly invisible they leave no tracks in the snow. They are the shapeshifters who know that they are no different from the mountains and the rivers, the plants and the animals, a chair or a computer. The second mystery teaching is MASTERY OF TIME. This is where we experience non-locality and an inner knowing that the past, present and future happen at the same time.
The third mystery teaching is KEEPING A SECRET, even from ourselves. The secret is that a very long time ago, the Immense Force that we know as God decided from Its place in the unmanifest void to Experience Itself. So, twelve billion years ago it manifested as a singularity, formed the matter in our Universe, and continued to explore itself as all lifeforms. Being omnipresent and omniscient, each of its manifestations also possess these qualities. This is the secret we keep even from ourselves.
Once we realize that we are spirit masquerading as us, we begin to remember the ancient stories from before there were people, the great stories of the stone people and the creation of Earth. We remember how we sat around the fire in many lifetimes. We stop searching for the sacred, realizing that we are sacred. We switch from a healing journey to a spiritual journey and begin to participate in creation. Instead of watching opportunities pass us by we realize we continually create new possibilities and say YES!
Sometimes we forget we are not separate from God for lifetimes. Oftentimes we forget that we are interconnected, that separation and isolation are contrary to our divine nature, and conformity leads to soul sickness. We are mapmakers of the soul and we map in hummingbird, at the level of the mythic. Instead of following an old map handed to us by our culture, family, and karma we instead choose to create a new and bigger one that satisfies the longing of our soul. The shamans refer to the old map as the silver book, and the new as the gold book. This gold book has blank pages ready for us to write our own story created from our inner divine nature. What story are you creating?
