With love to Astrid Ganz

Love for women has inspired great works of art, music and literature. Yoko Ono influenced John Lennon's music; Hester Thrale's letters inspired Samuel Johnson's writing; the Russian-born psychotherapist Lou Andreas-Salomé enthralled Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. Ludwig van Beethoven dedicated the Moonlight Sonata to his pupil, the 17-year-old Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. Charlotte Buff inspired Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Beatrice Portinari was an inspiration for Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Romantic love has served as a catalyst for creativity.

Like the women who have inspired great works of the past, an American woman, Astrid Ganz, is the inspiration for Soul On Fire , by Snow Eagle (aka Peter Calhoun). This is a collection of stories about the spiritual transformation of an Episcopalian Priest turned shaman.

“I dedicate this book to Astrid Ganz, my earthly partner and twin flame. No matter how many people you touch with your joy, laughter, and healing hands, no one will ever be touched more deeply than I. With all the miracles in my life, none can compare with how you stepped out of my dreamtime into my waking life to love and restore me.”

Snow Eagle was the ordained minister of St Jude’s Episcopalian church in Alabama for ten years, until the spring of 1968 when he left the ministry because he wanted to be true to himself.

“I would have been walking a paradox if I had remained in the church,” writes Snow Eagle. “My beliefs had changed so radically that I could not, in good faith, continue teaching the catechism, creeds, and doctrines that I had vowed to uphold at the time of my ordination.”

Soul on Fire is the unbelievable but true story of Snow Eagle’s thirty year quest as a shaman. Prepare to suspend disbelief as you read miraculous story to mysterious account of the author’s experiences: from making sticks spontaneously combust to making rain fall after a long spell of drought; from communicating with bees and asking them to leave a house they were taking over to having dreams that materialized in the physical world.

Snow Eagle had a recurrent dream about a woman. One day at a workshop he met a woman who looked exactly like the person he had been seeing in his dreams. “Twin Flame” tells the story of their coming together. Astrid Ganz entered his life when Snow Eagle’s health was failing. Astrid brought him hope, love and healing.

Soul on Fire is a story of the transformation of consciousness through the shamanic vision quest. It is the story of the magical world we live in. And it is the story of one man’s search for and discovery of true love.

To read more about Astrid: http://www.petercalhoun.com/AboutAstrid.htm
To get your own copy of Soul on Fire: http://www.petercalhoun.com/index.htm

The Fearless Life

The night before her annual mammogram in the summer of 2003, Jan Frazier said a prayer. "Could I maybe do this [mammogram] tomorrow without being terrified?"
Jan, who turned fifty that summer and had endured three breast cancer scares in her early thirties and forties, was afraid of an early death.
This is understandable. In 2003, the U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group reported that one out of every four women diagnosed with breast cancer dies.

"The specter of a possible young death put fear in my face, the ugly thieving monster of it," Jan writes in her soulful story of spontaneous awakening: When Fear Falls Away.

The following morning when this mother of two teenagers went to see her radiologist at a Jamaica Plain hospital, in Massachusetts, she noticed a change.

"I really was not afraid today. I couldn't get over it. After the films were taken and then the waiting began, I watched myself sit comfortably in the waiting room, reading my magazine, paying attention to what it said, instead of how it always was in the past, looking at the pages but not really seeing them."

When Fear Falls Away is a "testimony to a life transformed – an ordinary, fully suffering life transformed." It is about a middle class American woman’s victory over her worries about children, guilt, others' opinions, health, money, and fear of death.

There's so much suffering in our world. Even those who appear to have everything going for them are hurting deep within. The big cars, mansions on beaches, and the latest electronic gadgets do not in themselves satisfy our deep yearning for inner peace. When Fear Falls Away tells of the ocean of joy that is possible for all of us when we turn within to the inner consciousness. Material joy is like a drop in that vast expanse of deep peace.

Theravada Buddhism teaches that "enlightenment consists of the complete eradication of craving and attachment." In Zen Buddhism, it comes through emptying of the mind. In Western Christian literature, enlightenment is union with God. In Orthodox Christianity, it is divinization, or the process of becoming God.

Many doors lead to enlightenment's interior castle and include various forms of spiritual practice: meditation, devotion, and prayer. Mathematical or philosophical abstraction and being in the presence of enlightened individuals are other doorways. Enlightenment can also happen spontaneously.

These experiences are ineffable, difficult to express in prosaic terms. In Western Culture the enlightened individual can be misdiagnosed as mad if the individual experiencing this breakthrough in consciousness is not sophisticated enough to check himself or herself. At a diner while she was having breakfast with Peter, her significant other, we see Jan struggling to control her overwhelming urge to go out to tell everyone eating: "Do you know how lucky you are to be alive?"

Enlightenment is the most sublime change any individual can experience.

"The world has not changed. It is the looker who has changed. But I keep having to hit myself upside the head to believe the world is its same self. I cannot believe it. It's like I want to say, What? It's been this way all along? You mean, I could have lived my whole life this way, spared myself all that pointless anguish?"

I have borrowed a copy of When Fear Falls Away from the local library for my significant other who is reading it. I have bought two copies: There are some books you skim and forget. There are some books you read to remember. And there are some books you study and keep. For me, Jan Frazier’s book is a book I will read and reread, marking it, making notes, getting clues and tracking down all the influences that have prepared Jan for this most wonderful of human experiences.

Here is a like to Jan Frazier's website