Mandate For Living:

As I was preparing to teach the Healers’ Intensive (June 20 – June 26, 2026) my friend, colleague and land-mate – Cheryl Potts, (Kodiak, Seneca) – found a paper, Mandate for Living, with which I had opened the Healers’ Intensive in 2007, the first one she had attended. I edited it immediately and opened the Intensive with it 20 years later.

1. Accept that you live in relationship with spirit and so can be guided by spirit, can create a life wholly in accordance with spirit and spirit’s call.

2. Accept that you can free yourself of the motivations, influences, dynamics, standards, Judgments, even the seductive rewards of the dominant culture, and that you can live outside of religious dogma and human centrism.

3. Accept that the animals and the elementals are really communicating with you about matters global.

4. Accept that creation and the natural world can be restored and that you can contribute to restoring creation.

5. Accept that you have serious offerings and contributions to make to the world at this time but they may be entirely unconventional. Have the courage to pursue them.

6. Accept that peace is possible even in the most unlikely places and among the most unlikely individuals.

7. Accept that you can and have the right to be guided by and sustained by those old ways teachings and great traditions that have been true paths to spirit and the divine.

8. Accept that you can create a life and field of consciousness based on the understanding of your heart and soul.

9. Accept that everything that you do and how you live can be an opportunity for a future for all beings.

10. Accept that we will accomplish this TOGETHER.

As often happens in such circles, each person, reading in turn, received exactly the soul instruction which that participant required, even though it also seemed that that person was the least likely one to doubt. It was because we somehow received a mandate that mattered most to us and also was for us the most threatened. Inevitably working with these became a personal focus that week.

I watched a friend who has a profound relationship with the natural world and is able to communicate with the wild in her environment, still struggle with truly accepting that we can stop the violence and destruction the natural world is suffering and that we can restore creation. It isn’t that the wild is unable to participate in its own resurrection, it is that the Western and Imperial cultures which dominate our lives are violent, extractive and, are obsessed with technology and power, including AI, all of which destroy life. I realized that, despite my devotion, I, also, often despaired that the natural world could and would be restored. I sat with this all week knowing that if I didn’t hold the conviction of restoration, I wouldn’t do what is necessary to accomplish it. I worked tirelessly to convince myself that what I want more than anything in the world would come to be.

And so, on day one of my writing sabbatical, as I return to writing a Substack at least twice a month, I turn to writing about the restoration, the urgent restoration of the natural world, globally. At the Intensive, we spent most of our days outdoors and several people were “on the hill” during the 36 hours of silence. We were seeking ways to be in true communication with the beings of the natural world. We were seeking ways that we could be in alliance with the natural world on behalf of restoration. Alliance – which is why I chose these particular photos above from my safaris in Africa which show the animals in relationship with each other. Relationship, kinship, alliance are essential to restoration. Reassurance returned to me as I remembered so many occasions when communication with the wild occurred – mysterious and incontrovertible. As some of you reading this know it has occurred between me and the Ambassador Elephant and his herds more than a dozen times in the wild in Botswana and elsewhere in Africa.

And so it was as we were sitting in the closing circle on the patio that Gentle Boy began barking furiously, so I called out to him gently asking him to stop barking and instead come sit in the circle with us. To our surprise and delight, he did stop barking and came and sat down in the space between me and Sarah Velez, who took the photograph below. And then, although he had refused to do so on many occasions in the last months, when we finished with laughter and an enthusiastic wolf howl, he joined us, or rather, he took the lead so that we were aligned, even harmoniously.

Accept that creation and the natural world can be restored and that you can contribute to restoring creation.

Accept that the animals and the elementals are really communicating with you about matters global.

Mitakyue Oyasin

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