Salmon Wisdom Healing Project

The focus of the Salmon Wisdom Healing Project is to help people develop closer relationships with their own bodies, with nature and the earth, with the creatures of the land, sea, and air, with their families and their communities, using a blending of art, dreams, storytelling, body wisdom, ritual and ceremony, and western and indigenous sciences. By connecting with and moving through the deeper issues/energies that are hidden through the colonization of our bodies, our dreams, our ancestors, and the environment, we regain balance in our own bodies, and become more empowered to re-connect with and heal the larger ecological body, and participate in co-creating positive and sustainable physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, ecological, and ancestral well-being.

Vision:

In Irish myth, the Salmon is the oldest and wisest of all the animals, and it was said that any person who ate the Salmon of Wisdom would gain the gift of prophecy; they would be able to see their future. By seeking and working with the Salmon of Wisdom, we gain an understanding that is rooted deep in the collective awareness of all humanity. By remembering the dreams and stories of our ancestors, we can be like the Salmon of Wisdom and gain the gift of prophecy, remember our ancestor’s future, and reclaim a more balanced, holistic, and ecologically sustainable world.

I envision a world where people have access to fresh air, water and food, healthy homes, good jobs and safe neighborhoods, regardless of race or economic status. I envision individuals who are conscious of and understand the forces that affect their lives and their environment, have developed the skills to utilize these forces in a conscious, positive, healthy, sustainable manner, and are able to use this wisdom to take care of their own bodies as well as the larger environmental body, and plan for the future.

In this Western world we have largely lost our connection to the feminine as divine. This imbalance enables us to turn a blind eye to the destruction of the planet. The same can be said regarding our bodies. The environmental crisis is not a crisis of the environment; it is a human self-esteem problem. It is important for us as humans to truly value ourselves, our bodies, each other, all of life, and to create this reflection in the very thing that sustains us, Mother Earth.

Blessings to you all!

Only love,

Greetings everyone!

I have spent most of my adult life working with fish, beginning with my summer job working with Salmon up on the Klamath River for the Department of Fish and Game while attending Humboldt State University. Disillusioned by the way western science actually works, and what my dreams of being an “environmentalist” were and what the reality was, I changed my major to Art. Yet I still continued working with fish, and through my work doing fisheries field studies, focusing primarily on fish passage in relation to dams and diversions, I have spent thousands of hours on boats in the Sacramento/San Joaquin River system, I know the river intimately. I ended up working with white sturgeon at UC Davis on a sturgeon fish passage study, and my encounter with the sturgeon, these ancient fish that have been around since the time of the dinosaurs, broke my heart wide open, and I knew I had to do something different, that there was a reason I never studied the sciences, and the sturgeon told me I had to do something different, to stop hiding from what I could really be doing. So I left the UC Davis fish lab to attend a masters program at Naropa University, where I focused on Indigenous Science and holistic ecology. The title of my thesis is “Remembering Our Future: The Search For The Salmon Of Wisdom”.

With the recent Salmon runs here having been decimated, I knew it was time for me to “do” what I have been wanting to do for a long time. My dreams have been speaking to me too, I dream of fish almost every night, and recently had a dream that I was running for the Salmon, as a form of prayer for their healing and so they could run again. So in honor of the Salmon and my dreams, I am creating the Salmon Wisdom Healing Project, and my first action I personally take is to actually run for the salmon, as my prayer for them and their healing, and so that they may find their way home again. If anyone would like to join me in running as prayer and as an offering to the Salmon, please let me know. We can also walk or sing and dance for the fish. I will make a journey up the Sacramento River road, the route the Salmon take when they migrate back upstream, to make an offering to the Salmon for their healing. I will also be collaborating with my friend who is a fisheries biologist with the Department of Fish and Game, and we will be giving a presentation on Salmon as well as offering a series of healing workshops.

In the Western world we have largely lost our connection to the feminine as divine. This imbalance enables governments to turn a blind eye to the destruction of the planet. The same can be said regarding our bodies. The environmental crisis is not a crisis of the environment; it is a human self-esteem problem. We don’t truly value ourselves, our bodies, each other, all of life, and because our human bodies are extensions of the body of the earth, we take our low self-esteem, our self-hate, and create discord in the very thing that sustains us. To truly remember the preciousness of life, the warrior (the masculine qualities within both men and women) must surrender to the Goddess (the feminine energies within men, women, and the land).

Early Ireland was a matrifocal society.  Women had pwer over their own bodies, over birthing, the skills of medicine and midwifery, smithing, dyeing, and weaving.  Life was centered around the mother or the mother’s family.  The paternity of a child was often not known, nor did it matter, because every child belonged to his or her mother’s family.

To the indigenous Celts, the divine feminine is a wisdom bestowing goddess.  The great Irish war hero Cuchulain learns both fighting techniques and the inner wisdom of a warrior-in-balance from Scathach, a goddess on the Isle of Skye.  A number of poet-seers in the Irish and Scottish traditions experienced and related to the goddess Brighid as the patron of poetry and fire.  She acted as a muse for those poets who endured sensory deprivation, often seeking their quickening verses alone in the darkness of caves.

In Irish myth nine hazel trees of wisdom surround the sacred well of knowledge. The nine hazel trees are of wisdom, inspiration, and poetry. The salmon living in the well would eat the hazel nuts and it would make them wise, and it was said that any person who ate the Salmon of Wisdom would know all the wisdom and poetry, and gain the gift of prophecy. They would be able to remember their future.

In the Irish tale of Fionn macCumhaill (Finn MacCool) a boy named Finn went to learn poetry from the bard Finneces (White Wisdom) who had been seeking the Salmon of Wisdom for seven years. Finneces caught the salmon and gave it to Finn to cook, telling him to not eat any of it. Finn accidently burned his thumb while cooking the salmon, and immediately sucked his thumb, thus he was the one to gain the wisdom of the salmon and gained the gift of prophecy. From that day on, anytime Finn sucked his thumb he could see the future.

By remembering the dreams and stories of our ancestors, we too, like Finn MacCool, can remember our ancestor’s future, and reclaim a more balanced, holistic, and ecologically sustainable world.