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A lengthy but comfortable bus ride took me back through Mexico and into the United States. I enjoyed traveling by bus, as it gave me time to reflect and integrate the experiences I already had in preparation for whatever was to come next. My journey through Mexico had turned out to be enlightening and full of memorable surprises. I remembered the range of accommodations, from the gorgeous old hotels to the humble posadas; the pristine beaches I had walked and the crystalline water in which I had swum; the modest and warm-hearted peoples I had met and come to call friends; the noble heritage that still fed the spirits of these proud people; the temples and stone edifices that had either offered up their wisdom gladly or still stubbornly clung to their ancients secrets. No, I had had absolutely no trouble at all in Mexico, despite all the warnings I had heard prior to my arrival there: “What! You’re going by yourself, a single woman?” “What! You don’t know the language?” “What! You don’t know anybody there?” These had not been my challenges. Instead, I had been challenged by the still foreign places within my emotional body, places that competed for my attention by aggravating my teeth, by calling wasps to sting me, by cajoling my fear. Mexico had beguiled and tested me, inside and out. I did not expect Sedona to test me. But on this assumption I was wrong.
First came Los Angeles, my jumping-off point for Sedona. Who had not heard of Los Angeles, or been tempted by its promise of glamour and vibrancy? But as soon as I touched the energy of this City of Angeles, I felt aversion. It felt empty, wounded, and weary. I was staying in a modest hotel near the center of the city, and I spent the first few days in the city trying to more sensitively examine my rather negative energy response to it. Mexico had been open, natural, rural, alive, and ancient. But for all its frenetic activity, Los Angeles felt crowded by its own emptiness. I struggled to connect with the spirit of the land, and I knew it was not the miles of asphalt and the towers of steel and glass alone that were keeping me from succeeding. The drain of energy came not only from the relentless manmade environment but also from the energy environment, or lack thereof, that its people created. I was struggling not to make judgments, just energy observations-and what I felt was an intense estrangement between the people and the land. Los Angeles felt like a city of shadows to me.
In Mexican shamanism, Mictlan, the lower world or underworld is considered a necessary aspect of the sacred Whole. It is not a place of darkness and negativity, of evil or desecration. Instead it is, psychologically speaking, the potently transformative depths of the subconscious and dreamtime; and cosmologically, it is a repository of the primordial creative energies of Earth and even of the Universe. Los Angeles felt like a type of underworld to me, but not one that was held sacred. Here, there was an undercurrent of pointlessness. For all the vibrancy of the city, for all the incessant ...
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