Each year I post the Reading of the Year as channeled through the Grandmothers of the Four Directions. That reading is now available and can be downloaded here.

http://audriscottwilliams.com/id7.html

Nestled in an RV park in Sedona, the beauty and grace of the natural environment held us in awe. It is hard to come to Sedona and not be affected to the core. Perhaps the sheer beauty and power of Mother Earth reaches out and embraces her visitors to be the divine reflection she projects. I felt her gaze in the “red rocks”, in the star filled night sky as she watched us watching her. She saw into our hearts and she began her work of aligning our hearts and  our inner deceptions. Reaching deep into our souls, she exposed the unspeakable, the disharmonies that have us walking in less than our truths, our inner peace.

She conjured some magical spell that called us to regurgitate the madness of our own insecurities and projections. She called us out to face our own shadows, making us a catalyst for our own and each other’s healing.  Nothing was sacred except the exposure of our own illusions to get to a deeper truth. She, Mother Earth, presented the opportunity for to grow. It was painful. It left us raw and exposed. And, it gave us an opportunity to shift from outward projection to internal reflection. What we do with this experience remains to be seen. Will we have the courage to own our own “stuff” and shift into deeper healing? Will we become more compassionate and loving of ourselves and our soul group? Will we dare to face our shadows to release them so we can grow?

There is no surprise that a land such as Sedona would ignite such inner turmoil because even she has her shadow. As I walked the streets, my heart broke into a thousand pieces at the blatant disrespect of the people who once inherited this land. The dignity of her original inhabitants diminished to derogatory slogans and faddish shamanism. I sadly found myself walking another “Trail of Tears.” In 1876 the Yavapai and Apache tribes of this land were forcibly removed from this region to the San Carlos Indian Reservation, 180 miles southeast of Sedona. 1500 people were marched, in midwinter, to San Carlos. Several hundred lost their lives. The survivors were interned for 25 years.

Sedona is full of many paradoxes and those paradoxes create a vortex – becoming a spiral to madness, which in turn becomes the catalyst for a journey into truth. It exposes the lies and leaves us to clean up the mess. Be careful. Be mindful, for even the “truth” we hold, has its own paradoxical twists as the heart opens to deeper and deeper revelations -- where you and I are one and there is no “other”.