Hi,
And welcome back for part 3 of my interview on New Dimensions Radio with host Justine Willis-Toms.
I'm Shannon and grateful to have you here.
Today,
In the third part of the interview,
We dive into the spiritual practice of connecting with the medicine of trees and how working with them is healing to our own lives as well as the lives of the natural world.
I hope you enjoy the third part of our interview.
I'm here with Shannon Sullivan.
She's an interfaith spiritual teacher who resides in Tucson,
Arizona.
And Shannon,
We're talking about trees as the family tree and also the physical tree.
And before we go into other modes of ways that you use for healing,
Do you recommend that we find a tree either in our imaginary world or in the real world that we connect with?
I know you talk about a particular tree in Arizona and one of the parks that you've connected with.
Yes.
Well,
I see trees as my friends.
And so just like with a new friend,
You would want to learn more about that friend.
The way to ask questions of trees is more through our imagination and intuition and connecting through feeling.
And I have several meditations where I teach people how to connect through guided meditation to trees spiritually.
And through that,
Then I usually give an assignment to then move that into the physical world where once you've connected with a tree through meditation and through intuition to then go out into your environment and physically connect with a tree and what that does,
That touch along with the intuition.
So you have it on the physical and the spiritual planes together.
And it really begins to bring more of your intuition to life by connecting it into the physical world.
And so I like to have people do both.
You know,
Many folk tales and fairy tales and myths,
They'll talk about going into the forest.
And the guide,
Many times they'll be described,
The guide comes out of the tree.
Actually,
You know,
Physically starts to appear out of the tree.
So this has been part of our heritage for hundreds of years.
So I'm thinking also,
There's a wonderful book.
It's one of the great ecological novels of our time.
And it's by Annie Proulx called Barkskins.
And it shows a whole history of the forest told in a historical novel form of the U.
S.
Northeast and Canada to that whole migration of people and trees.
And it's just I highly recommend it.
It's called Barkskins.
I can really feel that how trees are so resilient and can weather violent storms and they have deep roots.
And I think that you even climb this tree that you talk about.
The one I have a specific meditation that I did for her.
And it's a grandmother ironwood tree.
And I just actually went yesterday to visit her because she's blooming right now.
But she's about 30 minutes east of where I live in the Ironwood Park.
And she's about 900 years old.
And the first time I met her,
I was able to climb up into her and hang out.
And I just I said,
Thank you for being so wise.
You're so old.
And she's like,
Who are you calling old?
And I'm like,
Oh,
My gosh.
And so she she said,
How old is the earth?
And I said,
Billions of years.
Yeah.
How old am I?
900 years.
And I'm like,
Oh,
Right.
You're not old.
But you're older than I am.
So I respect that.
And ironwood trees,
Part of the teachings that I share is their wood was often used to make nails because it was that strong.
That's why it's called ironwood.
However,
When you see her bloom,
She has these soft,
Small,
Pink,
Like delicate blooms.
And so I was asking her sort of what that represented for people as a teaching.
And she shared that it meant that in this world,
Sometimes we have to be as tough as nails.
However,
In order to stay connected,
We also have to keep an open heart and be soft.
So that we keep our humanity,
While still being tough and,
And following the things that we want to.
Right.
I'm reminded of years,
Some years ago,
We did several interviews with Julia Butterfly Hill.
And she spent over 700 days up in a redwood tree.
Luna thought that she was going up for a few days and turned out to save the forest around from being clear cut.
She crawled up into the tree and she lived there for over 700 days.
That's amazing.
And I just imagine we talked to her while she was in the tree.
And then we're talking to her when she first put her feet back on earth after that time.
And what a transition that was.
You can imagine,
I can imagine.
Many of us can refer to our childhoods and think of some particular tree.
I think children really gravitate to trees in some ways.
We hide in them,
We hide behind them,
We climb them.
They're sometimes our first friends in some ways.
But I would like for you to talk about other ways that you also work with people in their healing and in their opening and awakening.
And so you use artwork sometimes.
You use collage work.
Is that right?
Can you say something about that?
Yes.
One of the,
As I was on my journey of healing our family wounds and was gathering the soul of our family back together.
If you imagine like collage work being separate pieces and pulling them all in together and creating a piece of art out of it.
So you take all these separate pieces that are split apart.
And I think in shamanic work,
They call it soul retrieval.
So it'd be similar to soul retrieval,
But for the family.
And to continue my healing on that path,
What I would do is take pictures of the family where there were splits physically between everybody and honoring them and taking writing from my grandmother and pictures of my grandma and grandpa and of the family and the energies that represented them.
So an image of the Empire State Building where they came through and when they immigrated to the country,
Hummingbird to represent my grandma,
Hawaii to represent the love of that was home spiritually for my family,
Even though we didn't live there,
But we often visited.
And bringing all those pieces of beauty together and creating a collage out of them and honoring those pieces into a whole picture so as to see the beauty in all that was,
Even despite the painful places.
So this gives you another medium that's rather visual and it brings it to life in a kind of visual display of what that might look like.
Yeah,
And I have it in my home.
I framed it so that I can see it each day and remember and love and open my heart to our family and sending love out because even though my grandmother and grandfather are gone,
You know,
Our souls continue to live and continue to learn.
And even though their journey on the earth is not currently going on,
It is through me.
And so as I heal and see that beauty through that visual art,
It brings joy to my heart.
You also do,
Speaking about other traditions and bringing in other traditions,
You bring in chanting.
There's a chant you have or meditation that you have,
Chanting to the moon.
And what is the purpose of that and how can we use that?
There's a song that I wrote and it's a Harvest Full Moon song.
And I say I wrote it,
But actually it sort of was a gift to me from my spirit.
And what it talks about is if you see the moon spiritually as,
Especially the full moon,
When you go out and see that its light is the fullest in that moment and that it's shining brightly in the dark,
It represents shining light into the darker places within us.
And by doing that,
Sort of bringing them to light so that we can work on them.
And so this particular song is a celebration of that,
That no matter what we're experiencing,
Whether it's joy or pain or grief or love,
That these places are,
That the moon holds light on them so that we can really honor them.
And I think it reflects sort of that shadow work that if we delve deeper into it,
Allows us also to heal.
And so the song is a way to do that lightly without,
You know,
Creating suffering around it and instead through joy.
I'm here with Shannon Sullivan and I'm Justine Willis-Thoms.
You're listening to New Dimensions.
Thank you so much for listening to the third part in our four-part series.
If you're interested in diving more deeply to your own connection with trees and discovering your own intuitive skills,
I have a 10-day course here on Insight Timer that you might enjoy.
You can check that out on my teacher page.
Also,
If you enjoyed the song at the end of the interview,
I have this track recorded here on Insight Timer as well,
Called Harvest Full Moon.
Thank you so much again for spending time with me today.
We have one more part in this four-part series from the interview that I hope you enjoy connecting with.
I'm wishing you a joyful and beautiful day.
Namaste.
