Kelley Harrell Quotes

We don't heal in isolation, but in community.

Often it isn’t the initiating trauma that creates seemingly insurmountable pain, but the lack of support after.

Miraculously recover or die. That's the extent of our cultural bandwidth for chronic illness.

You don't find light by avoiding the darkness.

I'm ADD and psychic. I know things ahead of time but lose track of which is which.

A good editor doesn't rewrite words, she rewires synapses.

Too many irons, not enough fire.

Loving someone but not trusting them is a spiritual emergency.

I don't argue things being spiritual vs scientific, because I've never met anyone who knows enough about either to be convincing--including myself.

Being present is being connected to All Things.

Being a medium who can communicate with souls isn't the same as one who can interact with them. It's the difference between listening in on a conversation and changing the subject.

If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?

Phrases such as "I'm beside myself," "I was frightened to pieces," "I feel lost," "I feel like part of me is missing," originated from a sense of soul loss.

We can’t turn our true selves off and on situationally and expect them to carry and sustain us. Rationing creativity results in bipolarism of the spirit. Our creativity is also our life force. When we turn it off and on like a spigot, we start to become less and less able to control the valve.

Editing is the very edge of your knowledge forced to grow--a test you can't cheat on.

Symbols are miracles we have recorded into language.

a quick turn around a corner and my planet becomes sand on the shore of a dying Universe

The way other people practiced a sport, learned a dance, I sat with feelings to learn who I am.

The more I work with Nature and totemism, the more church is everywhere.

Learning shamanism solely from a book is like running with a razor sharp Ouija board.

Being healed means committing to use your resources and knowledge.

By bringing a soulful consciousness to gardening sacred space can be created outdoors.

What people resist the most about spiritual healing is changing their minds.

Occasionally I ponder all the things I'd have time to notice if I had more free time.

When we accomplish one thing, our ego wants to bask in the glory, though our soul is ready to move on to the next.

Sacred space” is another way of saying “with intention.

In Spirit, there is no such thing as indifference.

I think that being a soul in flesh is really challenging and we should all give ourselves more credit.

In the end, bless the darkness, hold the light, because the two aren't divisible.

The soul is infinite, made up of aspects that come and go all the time. It’s our nature for parts of the soul to travel while we meditate or dream. Through this process we grow, we learn new thoughts, thus desires, and our consciousness evolves.

Engaging spirits isn’t an elitist ability or industry, it’s being active in the connection with All Things. It’s innate to us all.

Recognizing the connection to All Things, even in creepy moments, keeps me true to my animistic perspective. Finding growth from them is my choice.

We're all bit of relaxation away from being Gods and Goddesses.

She was the cook, the hostess, the comforter, and the keeper of all the mysterious secrets for how to do just about everything.

Regardless of geographical region or culture gardening is perhaps the most common and shared experience of Nature.

So many words, so little time.

Museums are the anthropological screened porches of suburbia. You can be near something great, but not actually personally experience it.

Clear synapses are like driving in Ireland. You hit a straight-away and you gun it, cos you know it's not going to last long.

If a wound was all that was required to be a shaman, we'd all be one. If wounds were required, no one would be.

You can discard no one feeling and the full truth of an experience be revealed.

If we didn't have shadow we'd just sit around loving the light, likely doing nothing with it.

If you don't hate your darlings a little by the time they go to press, you haven't edited them enough.

Unless we can interpret that ecstatic trip in a way that better grounds our physical reality, trance isn’t worth much.

The idea that we sacrifice our innate wisdom at the feet of our Guides is really no different from the rigid religious doctrines that talked us out of our childhood spiritual knowing.

It's important to talk about fringe-of-the-fringe experiences, not just to show the humanity of intuitives, but to show humanity the commonness of intuition.

Online review sites are the slushpiles of feedback.

Need is choice come to fruition.

Have intention, sacred will travel.

Every initiation reaches a point of crisis, by design. If it was easy to let go of the old way, there would be no need for initiation. We’d seat easily into new wisdom.

Our Soul Allies light the fire in those initial visits, but it’s up to us to keep it burning.

A racist notion found in neoshamanic circles is placing high value on indigenous wisdom but not on indigenous people.

Where Ostara is the time of light’s arrival, Beltane is what grows from its warmth.

The rhythm of researching and querying holds all the fascination, endorphins, and residual scarring of picking a scab. It's a habit I easily fall into but without more than surface level ambition driving it can turn into a haphazard, oozing mess.

How can a nation nourished on diversity breed its own shamanic tradition without retracing its steps to its varied ancestors?

What we believe spirit visitors to be influences how they affect our lives. What we believe ourselves to be dictates how we react to them.

Should be" will always be a long road.

I function as an asterisk in the limbic system.

Divination is the ketchup of shamanism.

Commerce is the new green. Spend your money where your beliefs are.

All wisdom contracts then expands, contracts then expands. That is how consciousness evolves.

I first felt myself a shaky axis between worlds when I watched my grandfather move those prophetic queens.

Journeying is a lifestyle change.

Healing is active involvement in your process, ongoing.

We are all but symbols of some greater thing—totems of ourselves--subject to change and growth. When we forget that metaphoric sense of ourselves, we lose sight of the overall path.

At its heart shamanism is an ouroboros that, regardless of cultural or religious trappings that have crowded its path, what remains its critically profound gift to the present lies in its simplistic roots of the past.

When I say ‘practice’ I don’t mean repeating an act until you get it right. In this use, it means to instill regular discipline to accomplish a specific task, ritual without which we feel incomplete, or that our experience of each day is less.

There's no such thing as a cultureless anything. By virtue of animism, we are all part of a community.

Animism is reciprocity.

It's intuition, isn't it? Depression is intuition that I don't express, and if I just express those feelings, no matter how nuts they seem, there's no need for depression.

That we don't remember the beginning or the ending of dreams is our unconscious reminding us that it's all about the process.

We're all latchkey kids a threshold from peace.

Though it doesn’t feel like it, crisis places us front and center of desire, which is the force of power.

The body is more than the temple of the soul. It’s the grounded celebration of its rapture.

All Things are in constant relationship, and shamanic journey is the choice to put one’s self in direct contact and concert with that relationship.

We are the most open-feeling that we can be, when we can no longer be as we are.

The Old Norse cosmology gives us the awareness that while lightness may bring enlightenment, it is the darkness that initiates change.

Children arrive animists. They learn about life, themselves, and empathy by imagining the liveliness of everything they come into contact with.

Even in woo woo circles, shamanism is the fringe of the fringe.

Despite its prominence now, you don’t stumble onto the path of shamanism. That odd trail blazes itself to you.

Learning shamanism isn’t just about acquiring techniques in how to do it, but also how to incorporate and deal with the changes it brings to everyday life.

Everything in shamanism is about relationships.

I think the common experience is that modern shamans are called by the spirits; we just don’t have a collective belief system or community that recognizes the calling for what it is.

Life is not a test administered by ourselves or a higher authority, and we’re not in form to learn lessons. We’re here to thrive, to celebrate being our authentic selves until it literally kills us.

Whether used for the self or in service to others, the runes continually reflect the collective in the individual, the unknown in the known, and the personal embodiment of the unknowable in All Things—the aspect of mystery in Nature that we also embody.

We can only prosper where we are.

Intuition requires confidence.

It’s important to talk about fringe-of-the-fringe experiences, not just to show the humanity of intuitives, but to show humanity the commonness of intuition.

Furthermore, I don’t really understand “paranormal.” To me it’s just “normal,” and always has been. And what “veil?” I’ve never observed a separation between this world and any other. They are all conjoined. Generally speaking, once I can distance from my emotional involvement with spiritual phenomena, the experiences, themselves, are pretty… hum-drum. In other words, they’re a big, “So what?” Engaging spirits isn’t an elitist ability or industry, it’s being active in the connection with All Things. It’s innate to us all.

I know that nothing about me has ever been lost. I just need to know how to see it.

There is no such thing as failure, only readiness,

I know what he isn't saying. Very kindly, Simon's telling me that with all that has come to pass and all the help that has been made available to me, the only thing standing in my way now is me.

I just don't like feeling this way—stuck in the middle of respecting their choice but being hurt by it. How can I heal that contradiction?” “There is no contradiction. Go with what you feel,

I am my senses and nothing more, and I know this is what Allusius brings me.

The farthest we’ll ever have to travel is from our heads to our hearts.

As long as we string out the ecstasy of awe, we won’t do the work required to mine its precious teachings.

With ecstasy, what we do Here, directly impacts what we can achieve There.

The reality is, it takes daily cultivation of a spiritual path, preferably with spiritual kin in proximity, to sustain not the feeling of elation, but the focused, mindful path of steady growth.

The idea that our cosmology continues to change as we evolve in our spiritual studies and that we play a role in intentionally shaping it lies at the heart of the runes; thus, they are our deepest instruction for creating the self.

What makes control actually powerful is knowing what to do with it.

Joy lasts in memory, it thrives in sharing.