The ancient stone circle in Avebury, England.
The Path of the Feather is not about you rigidly following the path of any one shamanic tradition. The reason for this is that in the present time, we live all over the earth. The traditional teachings were taught for each specific people in each place. Now we believe that you can hear the voices of the ancient ones for yourself from wherever you are on earth. Then you create your own personal vision quest for your own life.
The spirit animals were different in almost every group of peoples. One group had a bear, another an eagle etc. Each group had the animals in different directions, had a different color, and different meanings and stories. It is now time to get in contact with your own animals and your own meaning. That is what The Path of the Feather is about. Now as people living on earth we need to hear a new shamanic voice from the earth herself, more applicable to us today. This empowers each of us by allowing us to see the illumination of our own spiritual path. We can do that through our own lives.
The place of power that exists for us comes from within us and from being able to hear the living earth speak to us. It has to be applicable and meaningful to each of us in our own communities. For us and others on this path all we have to do is go to sacred places of power on the earth around us and listen to Her voices and live Her visions. Now each of us can become our own shaman.
The Path of the Feather is based on a very ancient tradition rediscovering itself in its manifestation. For the ancient peoples, their whole world was The Path of the Feather. They were born with the animals and had the experience of animals everyday. They were the ones who lived on the land and loved it and knew its animals. They dressed as bear, as eagle, used feathers as offerings to speak to gods. We are reconnecting to that ancient tradition.
The medicine wheel stories in The Path of the Feather predate the stories of present day peoples. They come from the earth. They come from a place where the story had less cultural context. There was a time when we were all one, when we were all one race. In the evolution of our cultural context we became many peoples with many stories. But first, we were all one. We were not Indians or white men, we were simply human. The medicine wheel brings us back to the time where we can stand as one, where we were all connected. Then, there were not enough of us to be disconnected. We were one with the air, the animals, with the land. Before the stories were culturally embedded, there were no stories of separateness.
The medicine wheel is the way to reconnect to the ancient ways of being, to reconnect to a consciousness where we are the earth, we are the voice of the earth. Once, the animals were the voice of the earth. This is meaningful in our lives today because it helps us remember the essence of who we are. We are the essence of the earth. That is why this is so important. All sacred sites predated the contemporary native peoples by thousands of years. All sites predate modern stories and ways. They take us to our deep past when we were all one and listened to the voices of the living earth.