Debbie Philp

If your idea of meditation is sitting comfortably on a cushion in a softly lit, quiet room, with an hour-long recording of Tibetan singing bowls streaming on your tablet while incense smoke curls around you, sitting with squirrels is not the practice for you. If you are ready to be fully present to what is true now, even if what…

“Follow the turtle home,” repeated the box turtle, as he danced across the night sky. Each step sent a cloud of stardust flying, which left a sparkling wake behind him. “Follow the turtle home,” I heard again and again. When the drumbeat stopped, I came out of my first shamanic journey experience confused. What could that message mean? In the…

On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, I’m awake at 4:00 a.m. after another restless night during the COVID-19 pandemic and trying to think of a reason to say, “Happy Earth Day.” In 1970, the first Earth Day wasn’t a celebration, but a protest. Sparked by an oil spill, backed by a U.S. Senator, and organized from the ground up,…

On a Tuesday in September 2017 I had a Shamanic Reiki client in the afternoon, so my parents picked my son up from school. I arrived at their house to claim him as they were finishing dinner. When my father started to push his chair back, I said, “No, stay there. We have to run.” I missed out on a…

I am a month into the year-long Shamanic Reiki Evolving Master Teacher program and still feeling a bit lost. I took a break from my personal Shamanic Reiki development in 2017 to focus on business. It was a valuable learning experience, although what I learned was not exactly what I had intended to when I started out a year ago.…

I ventured out, alone, in my snowshoes, on a quiet trail through the woods. We had had the first substantial snowfall of winter a few days before, and I came to a part of the trail that had not been broken since the storm. I’m not experienced on snowshoes and it was only my second time out this season, but…