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"With the possible exception of prayer, which is more often a plea from a closed rather than opene valve, precious few of us were ever taught to go inside, shut up and listen, much less follow! Follow what? Listen to whom? Nonsense! Take a pill. That's just imagination. It has no substance, no intellectual emprirical data to back it up.

"I love how we pretend that something doesn't exist, then turn right around and name it. We turn our noses up at "divine guidance," but curiously give it this wide range of names like gut-feeling, motivation, hit, intuition, sense, inspiration, impulse, urge, premonition, desire, imagination. It's all Guidance, the Real You sending messages from the infinite intelligence You are, doing everything in its power to pass on some ideas or direction before you shut down again.

"Guidance is Soul-talk, God-talk, Inner Being-talk, Expanded Self-talk, Cosmic Escort-talk. Guidance does whatever is necessary to get our attention and help us step into our Wants, be it oil for the car or new hair for a shining head. But to make it work, we've gotto learn to trust what we're picking up on that station...."

"The cosmic joke is that we were designed to do just that, to live by our senses, not by our brains. But over the eons we've learned to think our responses instead of feel them, totally backwards from the way all the rest of nature lives. Animals and plants do it (live by their senses), while all of us closed-down, disconnected humans snicker at it. But when you really start playing the Feel Good game, I promise, it's better than an all-day ticket to Disneyland. You listen and do, listen and do, listen and do, trusting your Guidance without hesitation." - Lynn Grabhorn

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To me, the essense of contemporary shamanism is to go back to an earlier way of living. Imagine what it would be like to be in the world with the senses and instincts of our Power Animals, to be able to live on pure instinct at will. To be able to call up and respond to situations with the heightened awareness of Wolf, Eagle, Bear, Skunk, Mouse, Giraffe ...

This, in my way of understanding, is the shamanistic view of what Lynn has to share with us. When I am Wolf in my car, I am not the hunter; I am the human moving through traffic with eyes and ears open – alert to those signs of opening and closing, safety and danger. Listening to the whispers of inspiration, intuition, Guidance. What feels the right thing to do ... in Lynn's words: "What feels Good."

I think the author has hit upon another significant key: "without hesitation." Ordinarily, we get the hint, the intuition, the warning, but we take just a moment to question. Just a moment to reign in, decide, figure out, examine, judge, think about. Most often, then, old patterns, scripts and fears dull the senses and encourage us to discount, disregard. This is one aspect of what she refers to as a "closed valve." No juice gets through, no spark.

Trust is a huge issue for most of us in our culture. But for those of us who choose a more intuitive (and "shamanistic") approach to life, it MUST be different. The ability to hear and trust these encouragements and insights from Spirit is fundamental to this way of living. All of the tricks, techniques and practices in the Universe are just more "fiddling around" and "playing with" without deeply rooted and total Trust in Guidance from Spirit – That Which Is Bigger Than We Are.

Without hesitation.