Nixa - Lost art of heart navigation - a modern shamans field manual

THE LOST ART OF
HEART
NAVIGATION

Heart-centered living has been failing in the Western-influenced world with dire consequences for us and the earth. Nixa takes us on a journey that becomes a self-help manual for reviving our human nature through the deliberative and intuitive nurturing of our heart minds. In the process, we learn to rebalance our minds and center our spirits in life more broadly, opening ourselves to our unique gifts. Its a book for anyone ready to move forward toward self and community transformation.

DARCIA NARVAEZ, PH.D., PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME AND AUTHOR OF NEUROBIOLOGY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN MORALITY

With metaphor and poetic prose Nixa describes practical exercises, to which everyone can relate, for implementing the ancient wisdom of complementarity both within ourselves and in the world around us. Enjoy the read, follow the guidelines, and feel the joy of legacy you can start leaving in your wake.

FOUR ARROWS (DON TRENT JACOBS, ED.D., PH.D.), AMERICAN INDIAN ACTIVIST AND AUTHOR OF PRIMAL AWARENESS, TEACHING TRULY, AND POINT OF DEPARTURE

Nixas lovely book offers both an inspirational and grounded approach that requires embracing the four shamanic steps of hearing, honoring, acting, and protecting as core requirements on the navigational path of the heart.

LINDA STAR WOLF, PH.D., DIRECTOR OF VENUS RISING ASSOCIATION FOR TRANSFORMATION AND AUTHOR OF SHAMANIC BREATHWORK AND VISIONARY SHAMANISM

Jeff Nixa has created a valuable spiritual field manual for discovering and attending to our inner growth work. His ability to combine the practices of core shamanism with leading-edge spiritual psychology comes from his many years of serving from the heart. If you follow Jeffs practices and programs you will experience greater ease and freedom in your life as a result of expanded consciousness and the awakening of your dormant gifts, strengths, and talents. Every page of this essential book is filled with the love he exudes in all of his work.

MICHAEL STONE, HOST OF KMVRS CONVERSATIONS AND THE SHIFT NETWORKS SHAMANISM GLOBAL SUMMIT

The Lost Art of Heart Navigation acts as an insightful guide for the journey home to ones authentic self. It explores how the path of the shaman reconnects each of us with our soul, personal empowerment, and sacred creativity. This book is heartfelt, innovative, and greatly needed at this time.

ANNA CARIAD-BARRETT, D.MIN., AUTHOR OF SHAMANIC WISDOM FOR PREGNANCY AND PARENTHOOD AND COAUTHOR OF SACRED MEDICINE OF BEE, BUTTERFLY, EARTHWORM, AND SPIDER

The brain is loaded with neurotransmitters but so is the heart. In this remarkable book, Jeff D. Nixa helps his readers follow the path of the heart, a route well known to tribal shamans but one all but ignored in the modern world. Drawing upon ancient wisdom as well as the work of contemporary Jungian psychotherapists, Nixa provides exercises, rituals, and tools that are informative, visionary, andmost importanttransformational.

STANLEY KRIPPNER, PH.D., COAUTHOR OF THE VOICE OF ROLLING THUNDER

Relying on the wisdom of helper spirits, Jeff Nixa has designed The Lost Art of Heart Navigation to serve as a guide for those of us seeking purpose and meaning in our lives. With valuable tools such as breathing meditations, guided imagery, and outdoor moving meditation Jeff leads us through the challenges of modern life and into our own heart path. Join me on the adventure of saying yes to our hearts invitations!

TERRI HEBERT, ED.D., ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SCIENCE EDUCATION AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY

Foreword

This book that you hold in your hands is a tremendous resource, packed with lineage wisdom from shamanism, Jungian psychology, and multiple strands of influence. It is aimed at providing you, the reader or student of shamanism, with a solid base of information, principles, and powerful practices that will transform your life if you take advantage of them. The real creative genius of this book is the way it weaves so many useful sources and resources into a practical manual that is highly accessible and user friendly for the beginner and useful for the professional practitioner as well. I wish Id had such a manual for my own clients and apprentices early on. It takes a lot of creative thinking and intuition to write a book like this.

Jeff Nixa has honored me in this book, as his first teacher on the shamanic heart path, and in doing so has honored my own traditions and lineages, the Quechua Taita Iachak and the Cherokee path of my own teachers, but also other teachers and traditions Jeff has become exposed to and experientially worked with. These include the modern Mexican Toltec system and the Lakota Red Road wisdom, as well as mentoring in soul retrieval and leadership with renowned shamanic practitioner Sandra Ingerman. Jeff s own interest in a contemplative life, and in wild nature, finds expression outside shamanism in his Zen meditation and his love of the life and work of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Jeff has conducted many contemplative retreats, and Gethsemani Abbey and the fruit of all of these influences are woven into this book as well.

When I had the privilege of meeting Jeff, he came to Crows Nest Center for Shamanic Studies in the southwest Michigan woodlands near Dowagiac. We had what I call a fire talk, which is a heart-to-heart talk around or near a sacred fire. We connected with the sacred fire, and then moved to my little guest cabin in the Crows Nest forest. After we were comfortably seated on the cabins porch, Jeff said he wasnt sure why he had come to the center. But he knew something in him was curious about it and what we did here. So I asked him to tell me about his life, and I asked the two very powerful and strategic core questions that helped us cut to the root.

The first question was: What kind of life do you really want? Once Jeff had laid this out and made it relatively clear, I then asked: What seems to be in the way of this? Jeff replied to these questions by telling me he had been something of a career gypsy: he had been a lawyer, a hospital chaplain working with the sick and dying, and a massage therapist. But he had always felt restless, a feeling of not quite being on the beam of his precise calling. I could sense, from what he said, that he wanted to do something spiritual and connected with healing, a component of which would be contemplative and yet also involve nature. I didnt have to be a rocket scientist to feel the path Jeff was unconsciously groping toward might indeed be that of a shamanic life and a shamanic way of practice. More deeply, I gleaned from Jeff s story that he was restlessly searching for a path that would be a homecoming to his true self and a solidly felt sense that he was doing and living what he was here for.

I could also sense Jeff s gifts, intelligence, and great potential. I felt he was a little too centered in the head, however, and that his powerful intellect, shaped as it had been by his training as an attorney and chaplain, had led him to make life decisions based in security rather than in inspiration and inner guidance.

The shamanic heart psychology teaches us that the intellect has no idea what we are here for or what we really want. It is the heart that guides us in these matters. I could see that what would help Jeff would be a shifting of the crown from his head to the heart, with his mind as its servant. I thus invited Jeff to a vision quest. As I was talking about this, a doe and her baby fawn walked by the cabin porch. This seemed synchronistic not only for the obvious coupling of the doe and fawn, which the doe was mentoring, but also because the symbol of the deer is associated with shamanism and the heart (hart).