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Exploring The Shamanic Gifts Of Power Spots And Sacred Places, Working In Respectful Harmony With Mother Nature: by José Luis Stevens PhD.

Power Path Seminars

ISBN: 978-1-938458-00-2

All pictures by the author and travelers on trips or were purchased or allowed usage from:

http://www.dreamstime.com

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.fotolia.com

http://www.photoeverywhere.co.uk

“Some of the images in this book have been scanned from my personal photo collection before digital images were available. Think of them as ancient artifacts”.

Acknowledgements

My sincerest thanks to Bettina Lea for formatting, design, and layout as well as handling all copyrights and documents.

Great appreciation and thanks to Kay Kamala for editing the manuscript and her scholarly advice.

Love and appreciation to Lena, my wife and task companion who traveled to most of these power places with me.

To my daughter Anna, my travel companion on numerous shamanic adventures to power places.

To all who contributed by traveling with Power Path Seminars over the years to many power spots and sacred sites and participating in all the ceremonies with open, clear, full, and strong heartedness.

To all the paqos, shamans, maracames, and medicine people who shared the wealth of their knowledge about power places and sacred ceremony with me over the years.

To all the guardians of sacred places who allowed me permission to visit and learn so much from them.

Table of Contents

Introduction

What Is A Power Spot?

Vortices

Masculine And Feminine Nature Of Power Places

Spirits And Presences In Places Of Power

Human Contributions To Power Places

Living Upon Or Near A Power Place

Temples And Buildings Built On Power Spots

The Manhattan Power Spot: How To Clean Up A Major Site

Discovering The Apus

Power Spots And Their Alignment With Sun, Moon, And Stars

The Geomancy Of Power Spots

Power Spots And The Power Grid

How People React Or Typically Feel In Power Spots

How To Work With Power Spots

Personal Experiences In Power Places

Places Of Great Power

Africa

Asia

America: Central & South

America: North

Caribbean

Europe: Eastern

Europe: Western

Middle East

South Pacific

Conclusion

Bibliography And Resources

Authors Books And Resources

About The Author

Introduction

Pizac: Sun Temple, photo by Dennis Flynn

This is a time on the earth when power spots and sacred places are waking up to support the massive changes that are leading to an awakening of mankind. They are part of the network of tools and gifts provided unconditionally by Mother Earth to support you in your own awakening process. Many of these sacred locations have been in constant use for millennia and some are latent, waiting for the proper time to manifest and pour forth their largesse. They have the capacity to intensify your deepest desires and wishes, enhance your prayers, raise your awareness and vibration, open your creativity, increase your energy field, heal you and much more. Spirit never meant for these gifts to be ignored or misused through ignorance and neglect. They have enormous shamanic power and like power tools, understanding how to use them is important if you want to take advantage of all they have to offer without inadvertently causing harm.

The purpose of this book is to help you to make the most propitious use of the power spots and sacred places in your area and wherever you choose to travel. This short book about power places on the earth will help you learn what they are, the differences among them, their ingredients, their historical human visitors, and where they are to be found. Some of them are well known and some power places are obscure, off the beaten path, some with structures and temples, some without. In addition you will learn about how to use power spots, how to care for them, and many other subjects related to them.

I have included tales from my own wanderings and exposure to power spots to give you a sense of what they are like and how you can interact with them. I have also included everything I have learned from the shamans and indigenous peoples I have studied with. Over the years I have learned to love power places and seek them out to help me on my journey through life. I do not know all the power places available on the earth because there are so many and still others are hidden away in local areas where I have never been, known only to the inhabitants of those places. The right ones are waiting to support you on your journey and will find you if you show even a minor interest. I hope your journey will lead you to many more of them because it is a stupendous time for discovery and transformation.

Wirikuta, Mexico, photo by Tarin Davies

What Is A Power Spot?

Machu Pichu, photo by Dennis Flynn

Since the dawn of time human beings have been inexorably drawn to particular locations that for them represented and held intense energy, great power, healing, and in a word, the “Sacred”. These special places, found in every continent throughout the world, became places of pilgrimage, attracting shamans, mystics, monks, and nuns seeking power, visions, wisdom, and enlightenment. In addition they attracted sick and injured people looking for healing, lost souls, adventurers, and scholars wanting to learn more from Spirit. Some power spots are great mountains whose peaks, lost in the mist, force back all but the most hardy. Some are found in bubbling hot springs, volcanoes, or unique places with strange and powerful rock formations. Others spots are beautiful lakes, special valleys, confluence of rivers, thunderous waterfalls, mysterious caves and caverns, unique islands surrounded by salty seas or huge freshwater lakes. Over time people built stunning structures on many of these places: pyramids, temples, mosques, churches, and even monasteries and convents. Some, like the pyramids of Egypt, Lourdes in France, or Machu Picchu in Peru, still draw millions of people every year to pray or experience their particular magic.

What makes these places unique, powerful, and magical? Where do they get their power? What happens to people when they take great pains to travel to these wondrous locations?

Koriconcha: Temple Of The Sun in Cusco, Peru, photo by Dennis Flynn

What makes these places special?

For millennia peoples of various parts of the world have studied places of power in their vicinity and have come to similar conclusions. The Greeks, the Celts of the British Isles, the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Incas of the Andes, the Taoists and many others have all contributed to a science that is known loosely as Geomancy or the study of place. They noticed that power spots were located in specific locations where the landscape contained certain ingredients. For example, a Taoist geomancer could readily understand why an Incan temple was located where it was or a Druid could easily see the reason an Aztec pyramid was built in a certain spot. They all understood the basics of the flow of energy in the land itself. A little further on we will discuss some of their observations.

More recently in modern times, some studies have been undertaken to understand the makeup of the soil in known power places like Stonehenge and Avebury Circle in England, the pyramids at Teotihuacan in Mexico, Tihuanaco in Bolivia, and other locations around the world. What they have discovered is that most of these places have a higher level of radioactivity than the surrounding areas. These are also places where there is frequently a higher presence of uranium, stronger electromagnetic features in the earth, and other anomalies. In other words they are not necessarily normal. Animals act strangely in these locations, plants may grow at angles, water may be present flowing under the ground, and there may be fractures in the earth as in plate tectonics. Indeed, there are often strong outcroppings of quartz with millions of tiny quartz crystals glistening in the rocks. Even the weather may act strangely in such places often attracting rainbows, whirlwinds, freak storms and the like.

Power spots may be found in any terrain but many of them are not necessarily easy to get to. Often they are not easily accessible to the average pilgrim and in some cases very difficult to reach as in Machu Picchu in Peru, Easter Island in Chile, and Lhasa in Tibet. Yet people by the millions have found their way to sacred power places, often at great peril or cost to their own comfort. Some great power places remain largely undiscovered, waiting for an age when they will be revealed as the generators they are. These are often known only to a few older souls in their vicinity.

Mountain Pass: Ladakh, India, photo by Lena Stevens

In addition to the great and famous power places are hundreds of thousands of smaller localized power places used by indigenous peoples as ceremonial sites, places of pilgrimage, prayer, and vision quest. In fact, in almost every place you may wander on this planet you will find certain spots that have more intense energy, special qualities, and places that magnetize you to them depending on your sensitivity and awareness. Sometimes in a small area of land, perhaps a half an acre, there will be a rock or outcropping that will hold exceptionally positive energy compared with sites only fifty meters away from it. Therefore one need not travel extensively to find places that may be highly beneficial to meditate or pray in. The earth seems to be equipped with auspicious places no matter where you are. How do you recognize them? Again this will be covered in more detail in an upcoming section.

Many years ago in the early nineteen eighties my wife and task companion Lena, traveled to the western coast of Mexico to a little fishing village where her father, an architect, was building a unique home right on the Sea of Cortez across from Baja. Situated in the Sonoran desert, the terrain was rugged, studded with cactus, Boojoom trees, creosote bushes, and harsh but very beautiful red rock outcroppings. One day we met some Seri Indians, tall and dark, unlike any other Indians in Mexico in looks and language. Indeed their language has no known root being like the Nauatl spoken by Huichols and other tribes in the region. We bought some very beautiful but simple carvings from them. One, a shark, I still have and admire.

One day we left the beach to drive out on a rough dirt road into the hot desert on an exploratory excursion. At that time we had little shamanic training and knew little about power places other than what we had read in Carlos Castaneda books. After we had driven a considerable distance into the mountainous terrain we stopped our VW bug to view the breathtaking garden that is the desert. Glancing up we saw a canyon leading up and out of sight that caught our attention. For some reason we were drawn to park the car and hike into the pristine terrain following small animal trails upward. Near the car we found the dried carcass of a red tail hawk whose red tail feathers were still in excellent condition. After asking permission we removed them and eventually they became the first feathers we were to use in our apprenticeship with Guadalupe, the Huichol shaman we were to apprentice with for ten years.

The trail led upward through a hard rock scrambling canyon where it took all fours to scale some huge boulders blocking the arroyo. Eventually we climbed up high out of the desert floor and there, in an obscure place we discovered a cave. The dark opening of the cave beckoned to us like a mirage of shimmering water in the heat of the desert. Scrambling up further we arrived at the relative cool shade of the cave entrance. We could smell the bat guano and hear the squeaks of hundreds if not thousands of bats hidden above in the recesses of the cave. Looking up at the walls of the cave we discovered stunning pictographs of shamanic figures, ancient and beautiful. The cave literally exuded power and energy. We sat meditating there for a long time each receiving strange images and visions. Eventually we felt complete and made our way down and out of the canyon. Little did we know we had stumbled upon an ancient place of great power, obviously used for vision quests by the local Indians. At that time we did not know to bring offerings, protect ourselves, or know exactly what to do in a power place such as this but our hearts were open and we did what came naturally. In retrospect we have been able to see that the visit to that cave launched a lifelong study of shamanism, our apprenticeship with Guadalupe, and our travels around the world to learn more about places of great power. We also realized that the visit to this cave was no accident. We were drawn there by powers we had no inkling of at the time. We were beginning our life task work and obviously receiving the guidance and help we needed to cast us onto that path. This is what a power place can do.

Cave Entrance, photo by Peter Davis

Over the years we have visited that place several times and always it is a pilgrimage, a rough scramble in harsh terrain and always it is worth it. A few months ago we visited again, this time with our grown children Carlos and Anna. We wanted to introduce them to the birthplace of our journey. I struggled with a recent torn meniscus and had to use a walking stick to navigate the difficult path but I made it. Once again it was worth it to receive the blessings of that hidden sacred place in the desert of coastal Mexico. That place is inside me now.

Vortices