"Love Your Journey Through Life!"

Altar Making – A Spiritual Practice to Deepen Your Connection to the Sacred

This lovely book will walk you through the whys and hows. I asked some wise, dear friends to contribute and they gave me a wide range of surprising insights you will not find anywhere else.

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I see clients out of my home for body-mind-spirit work. When they come to see me, they come from their stressful lives, from stressful driving here. I wanted to create a space that helps them to slow down, to connect to nature, and to their core.

I also wanted a space that made it easy for me to connect to my core, to recharge after demanding work with my clients. I knew I wanted a water feature, I wanted rocks, and trees, as these are elements that I have a deep connection to.

I found this wonderful, soulful man, Dan Lundquist of Nurtured Earth Gardens, who helped me design a waterfall, and the surrounding area. Together we did the drawings, and then went out to a rockery to choose all the different stones for the waterfall and the rock gardens individually.

Dan did all of the work, while I helped make decisions of placement where necessary. I dedicated the garden to Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion, my deepest role model.

A year later a neighbor built a 3-story house just behind my sanctuary that seemed to tower over it. This moved me to redesign the sanctuary, make it bigger and ad a resting place behind the waterfall.

I found the artist Damien Sieradsky who took my ideas and turned them into a wonderful 3-dimensional hut that invites my clients to wait in for their appointments, and me to spend many hours alone and with friends enjoying this sanctuary.

So William, it was very nice to write this, it reconnected me to the creative process, and gave me a lot of appreciation of what was created.

With love,

Ursula
Seattle www.UrsulaPopp.com

An altar is a place where you put things mindfully and that brings forth certain aspects of your self. I have at least seven.

These two altars are homages to Miggy and Otto. (Her mother-in-law and father-in-law.) Suzanne says, "I feel connected."

Suzanne Wittmann
smoothwater2000@comcast.net

This is the story of how altar work has been used to help a family in crisis. There are details that apply to altar work in general because they show how this altar is linked to the situation, how it was effective, and how our choices create the threads of life that weave into this kind of work.

Our family has unsuccessfully struggled with a problem that's grown steadily worse for about the last ten years. Shortly before the latest peak in this slow crisis, I followed up on a suggestion made by my Life Coach William Wittmann and created an altar for all involved.

A short time afterwards, direct and effective change began for all involved, with positive, focused help arriving in a big way. No, the problem isn't totally resolved. There is relief though, because for the first time it seems there is a resolution in sight.

I can track the series of events that led to the altar five years back to one specific, and cold, mid-December day. Wandering on a local ridge for the first time, I thought I was just on a trip to explore new territory along the edges of a favorite valley.

After wandering the ridge a while, I was walking down a small slope, across frozen stony soil covered with loose pebbles. When I slipped, it was so fast I can't describe the events sequentially. I was walking, the next moment I was on the ground, my right leg bent outwards in a way I don't usually sit. A few moments later, the meaning of the soft crack I heard as I went down was made clear by the pain in my leg when I stood.

No, this isn't an intense survival story. My leg was broken, but it was only a crack in the small bone of my lower leg. I was totally able to make it to the jeep, drive home, even switch out of my woods clothes and drive myself to the Dr.'s office. The break wasn't a big challenge. What's important is that the time off from work gave me space to make choices that led to a series of positive, and significant, changes.

My stepdaughter was about seven, and I had been looking for a way to role model how I handle class work. Just days before the injury, Wilderness Awareness School was mentioned in an email. Following another quiet inner urge, I used the time to begin their home study course. An early result of the injury is that this became a successful way to role model class work while doing something I loved.

The Kamana Program is designed to help one become a more complete naturalist, and continue on into tracking if desired. Through that connection came an email mentioning William Wittmann. In a session with him, not long after he agreed to work with me as Life Coach, I mentioned being unable to find a specific kind of book on tracking, and that I kept seeing it in my Minds Eye. I think he saw the significance of that right away.

Following his encouragement, I began to write the book. Eventually I retired from my full-time job, and shifted into full-time work on the book. That has now blossomed into my greatest passions, telling track stories and writing. Please be patient, this all ties in!

The latest tracking for The Book of Track Stories had drawn me back to the ridge before the family problem blossomed into another crisis. The day after William and I discussed it in a session, I was wandering the ridge with the altar idea in the back of my mind, but not yet committed to it.

As I crossed the ridge, I took a turn I usually avoid. It leads to deep, soft, snow that's hard to travel through. Climbing down an outcrop of rounded boulders I noticed one with green and fresh-looking Kinnikinnick rising out of the snow near its base, and felt a sense of rightness there.

I trust the wisdom of gut-feelings, and I think I decided to go with the altar process as that "Yes" feeling came soft and clear. The choice made, I said a simple prayer at the spot to explain my intentions and ask permission.

That night I wrote my prayer as a poem, and returning the next day, I waded through the soft snow to the boulder. I sat on another dry boulder for a while, using Owl Eyes to center as I soaked in awareness of the area. When I do that my body sometimes just knows it's time to do things, so after a while I found myself getting up and beginning to set up the altar.

The set up was simple. A request to the community for permission to use the space, a pinch of tobacco to say thanks, then I read my prayer aloud so the intent could soak in as much as possible, and left it there.

I believe that prayer is much about how solutions come as a flow through the connections we all share. I wasn't expecting an instant response; I try to leave room in my hopes for the results to be whatever they need to.

In this case the events that led to the altar work had begun at least years before, and the results began to surface about a month after. Now it's five years later and larger significances of the choice made during the time of that injury are still appearing.

In hindsight I can see I was at the crest of a wave of life-events that goes back more than twenty years (hmm, a ridge has similar qualities!). My heart has always been drawn to Nature; it's a major thread. Twenty years ago I was faced with a hard choice when I came to the most significant step I could have taken towards involvement with the natural world. The quiet inner voice was saying I needed to do other work first.

That was no easy time. I felt that level of involvement with the natural world was all about listening to the inner voice. But my inner voice was telling me I had to delay, complete a different path first, and I had no idea how long it would take, or if I'd ever complete it. It truly seemed I stood a fair chance of giving up what I longed for most

I followed that small voice, and twenty years along that thread, not long before this injury, the realization came that I had completed the work that required the delay.

I was surprised when I realized my inner voice was saying it was finally time to make that long desired choice. The rightness of that twenty year old choice was affirmed by the synchronicity of the space in my life to choose, just as freedom to move towards that long desired goal had come.

More threads were weaving together even before that space came. I'd already discovered Wilderness Awareness School, already had decided to role model which led to choosing their program. This class work brought the thread that led to the altar work, and five years in the future this would link to a source of help when family problems reached the latest crisis.

The way change flowed through and around that injury, ultimately leading to the altar work illustrates that using an altar is no vague mystical ceremony, isolated from the rest of creation. Rather it's a practical process of working with and through the threads we all share.

Past and present choices, events, place, intent, and community all link together and are the work. They interact to create change that shows up in the appropriate time as new choices, directions, and even more threads.

I think location made a difference in this case. I've come to believe that particular ridge is a place that facilitates positive change. I've been convinced by a series of significant changes in my life, each involving that area….and then there's also a gut feeling about it. The effect or energy of this ridge isn't clearly apparent to my senses. I don't know why, or how this works, so I can't explain it.

You know how the newness of some changes can feel slightly uncomfortable? There's a bit of that feeling there. Overall, the area feels neutral to me, not so overwhelmingly positive that I want to stay and soak the energy in, and it's definitely not one of the places in the woods I avoid. Those have an energy that feels very uncomfortable and raises hairs on the back of my neck.

What happened around that injury is relevant here because it was a thread to significant change. It created a break from the usual routines (pun not exactly unintended), and that time was a clear space I used to make choices that had a number of later effects. Among them perfect timing for the choice that sent my life in the direction my heart had always longed to follow.

I've wondered about these choices, and how they circle back. I firmly believe we all act in a connected way, that all parts of creation make choices, and have needs, not just us humans. So, I sometimes wonder if it was a combination of my choices, and a need of the community on the ridge, that brought me back there.

I've described several aspects of the events that came together and led to this latest altar work. I haven't mentioned stillness yet, and it may have been one of the most important. By "stillness", I mean that it may be enough to just stay present and aware, both externally and internally in situations where immediate action is not necessary, or is impossible.

Sometimes this inner stillness, just observing and embracing the situation without striving for an answer, allows solutions to arise that I'd never have considered otherwise.

Change has come as serious help, and it's arisen naturally; I didn't do anything to make it happen. I left "easy" out of the prayer, and now that the effortless solution has arrived, I'm working my tail off! The situation is still difficult but I can see movement that seems to be narrowing towards a bottom to the crisis. Allies have come who can see more deeply into the situation than I.