- My Teachers/Elders -
Eliot Cowan 1946 - 2022
Eliot Cowan was a tsuarimikame, or senior shaman, in the Huichol tradition of the Serra Madre Mountains of North West Mexico.
The Huichol people’s sacred traditions and connections to their gods have remained intact through their thousands of generations. Eliot apprenticed with Don Guadalupe Gonzalez Rios, an eminent Huichol shaman.
Eliot was the founder of the Blue Deer centre, located in the Catskill hills in New York State. Grounded in the guidance of elders from ancestral traditions, the centre provides a setting to promote the teaching and practices that promote a balanced relationship with the natural world, which they recognise to be a divine living presence.
Eliot was a founder elder of the International Sacred Fire Community that is working to rekindle mankind’s relationship to each other and the world through the universal and Sacred Spirit of Fire. It also works to preserve and promote the wisdom of the ancestral traditions while teaching how these perspectives and processes can be integrated into modern life to generate balance, openness and health.
Intact indigenous cultures view the world around us as a manifestation of the Divine from the smallest pebble to the trees, rivers, mountains, all the way to the great elemental forces. They refer to these manifestations as gods and maintain close relationships with them.
David Wiley
David Wiley is a Tsaurirrikame (Elder Shaman) in the Huichol tradition of the north-western Sierra Madre of Mexico and is a Granicero (weather Shaman) and healer in the Náhuatl tradition of the highlands of central Mexico. In these roles he serves his community as a counsellor, healer, ceremonial and ritual leader along with being recognized as a spiritual conduit for the elemental god of fire known by the Huichols as Tatewarí or Grandfather Fire. David is an elder of the Sacred Fire Community.
He travels internationally offering healing work, teachings and counselling. He is a tireless servant of his Gods and his people, working to bring more heart and fire into the world through community building, based on being in right relationship to the divine living world.
The Burren
The Burren, or ‘Boireann,’ meaning ‘stony place’, approximately one hundred and fifty square miles in size, was born in a tropical carboniferous ocean three hundred and fifty million years ago and came to settle with its enormous amount of embedded fossils in North West County Clare on the south shore of Galway Bay, Ireland.
Geologically, ecologically, and archeologically the Burren is a treasure trove - her exposed Limestone paving and terraced hills, her rich and rare flora, over two thousand ancestral monuments dating as far back as about 2,500 BC, her second largest stalactite in the world and over two hundred holy wells.
But even more than all her incredible richness and beauty, the energy in the Burren is serenely sacred. The veil between the mystical and the mundane is thin. The land here, the rocks, plants, waters, the elements and abundant elementals have been my divine teachers since her undeniable spiritual calling to my heart and soul in 2001.
Every time I come to the Burren I receive. That is my intention and the Burren’s intention. I receive silent time to relax, to reflect, realise, release, realign and recharge. That is just the first layer in a complex web of realities.
To read some excerpts from the Burren’s Prayers, Poems and Teachings, please click here.
