KEVIN SNOW
Month 9, Week 1
RMT, LLC, CHt, Reiki Master, Intuitive Counselor
TheDesertShaman.com
The Importance of Relationships
[These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The information on this audiocast is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.]
[Theme song playing]
Robyn:Hello everyone and welcome to month nine of the Self-Care Revolution, where we’re exploring power of community. All I can say is that every month we’ve had an amazing theme. We’ve brought in expert speakers from around the globe to share their top message on issues such as thoughts and food is medicine, exercise is medicine, heart and breath matters, transmuting and releasing trauma. We just finished a powerful month’s theme about empowerment.
This brings us to the idea that we are not alone. We are part of humanity. We are part of many difficult cultures, colors and we are certainly a diverse nation and earth. We are very excited to bring this whole message of community and how important it is now more than ever, but is part of who we are. Now, we’re starting this month’s theme with our own co-host, Kevin Snow.
Kevin:Hi, I’m here.
Robyn:My name is Robyn Benson. I’m a doctor of Oriental medicine for 21 years and Founder of Santa Fe Soul Health and HealingCenter, which we built 8 + years ago. We are the home of about 30 practitioners that offer 40 different services. We are a community of practitioners and that’s what makes us very unique. We aren’t just one-two-or three but we have 25-30 of us at any given time available, so we’re able to offer our Santa Fe community and beyond our services. We have people that fly in from all over the country to work with two, three or more of us.
To find out more about the Self-Care coaches and practitioners at Santa Fe Soul, please go to SantaFeSoul.com. If you have questions regarding the Self-Care Revolution, which is a 12-month series. We are going strong and we are definitely going into next year. You can reach us at . We would love for you to bring any of your friends, family members or colleagues here because there’s so much free content and unbelievable bonuses from our very generous speakers. It’s not too late to join, because we are going strong as I said not only this year but beyond.
Kevin, this is a unique opportunity. We have interviewed at least 80 speakers so far this year.
Kevin:Yes, what an incredible journey.
Robyn:It’s been incredible and now we get to hear your brilliance and let you share about your work. Kevin is a highly sought after coach here at Santa Fe Soul, because he offers so many different things. We call him fondly the Desert Shaman, but I’ll tell you exactly even though I’m not sure this bio will do justice to speak of his skills.
Kevin has a BA in psychology and is an intuitive counselor and Shamanic practitioner, specializing in helping people to create better relationships in their life. He’s trained in several healing modalities including:
- Hypnotherapy
- Energy psychology
- Shamanism
- Reiki
- Reflexology
- Toe reading
- Body work
- Dream yoga
Kevin is also a gifted intuitive and uses an eclectic mix of tools in his healing sessions. From personal experience I can say that he really helps people get clear. When Bob Doyle was here for our live event called the Self-Care Revolution Bliss Event, he became very well known in ‘The Secret’, he and Lynn Rhodes both had sessions and they both came out with amazing testimonials like this guy rocks and what’s he doing in Santa Fe because he should be in LA with us.
A lot of people want clarity. They want to get clear about many issues and that’s something that in a 60-90 minute session Kevin can do is to help people get clear in their lives, which is a great gift. Would you like to start with some opening remarks and then I’ll ask you some questions?
Kevin:Absolutely. I’m grateful for that introduction. What an amazing gift to be part of this lineup in the Self-Care Revolution. My gift is having had the chance to interview so many incredible speakers and to be part of this amazing year of self-care has been completely revolutionary to me. I know that my life has transformed amazingly so, just in this last year and even I have gained greater clarity. I appreciate that clarity on my message of how I can help people.
I have gotten better clarity on helping people with relationships and I think that’s why I gave this title for our talk today. To use a Lakota word MitakuyeOyasin and this idea that we are related to everything, so it’s not just our relationships. It’s not just the people we’re related to or our family members, because that’s what it sounds like when you say this word, all my relations. These are the people I’ve been related to, but I’ve had such great clarity in standing in a medicine wheel and understanding the inner connectedness of that wheel and my inner connectedness with everything that I could even imagine.
Robyn:You mentioned a medicine wheel. What is that, for those who have never heard of that and don’t know what it is?
Kevin:Certainly. A medicine wheel is a circle of rocks. I try to simplify things in my work and understanding the medicine wheel can go many realms of depth to understanding what each rock means, the position of the rock and how they are related to us in our lives, how we move around the wheel. But throughout history as far as I can tell and throughout recorded history, cultures have used circles of rocks to stand in, stand around and identify a sacred space. That’s what I think the medicine wheel is, is a sacred space.
Robyn:Typically, aren’t there eight different sections?
Kevin:Absolutely. It’s like a pie, so when you think of Thanksgiving Day pie and you cut this into eight pieces, that’s the circle and you can identify it into these segments. In most traditions they identify them with the directions.
Robyn:So would a labyrinth also be considered a sacred space?
Kevin:Yes. Again, when you see labyrinths they’re usually created out of stone and that idea that the stone holds the wisdom, that it is a living being… I’ve thought about this and worked with it in psychology and telling people that stones are living beings probably isn’t so acceptable in that community, but really understanding that we are related to everything, we have to give things in our life animation.
Robyn:Kevin, our amazing tribe, our Self-Care Revolution community has been with us for many months now. Would you give us an inside view of who Kevin Snow really is? How did you get into this medicine? How did you get into energy psychology?
Kevin:I was a commercial photographer for many years in grade school and high school. That’s all I ever wanted to do was take pictures and be an observer of life. I was in a serious car accident and that car accident, although it was painful and difficult at the time, put me on a path of meeting different healers and understanding what healing really was and integrating it into myself and realizing I think I’m that guy.I think I am a healer.
To each teacher that I’ve had, the first thing they would say to me is do you know who you are? I would invariably say I think I do, but apparently you see something else than I do. What they were seeing is this healer, the desert Shaman that I have become. I love the idea of the desert Shaman and I use it as a business name because it’s a culmination of all the teachers I’ve had. Giving gratitude to every person I’ve met has been a teacher.
Robyn:What time of your life was your accident?
Kevin:I was in my late 20s. I have since learned astrology and learned that that’s a critical turning point, the Saturn return that they talk about in astrology so that was my Saturn return. Apparently, what I understand is that I had gotten some subtler messages prior to that that I needed to change direction in my life and I guess I didn’t know to listen to them, so this was a fairly awakening message.
Robyn:Thanks for sharing your life story and what has brought you to this point today. I thought it might be neat, since you’re talking about MitakuyeOyasin… I’ve been in many circles and sweat lodges which is part of the Native American tradition, so all my relations as a hello and goodbye, I thought it might be nice if you’d share with our listeners the Lakota prayer, maybe reading that in your own wonderful voice.
Kevin:Absolutely. The idea of this prayer is that we are all calling in all of our relations.
MitakuyeOyasin--- all my relations—
I honor you in this circle of life with me today. I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge you in this prayer.
To the Creator for the unlimited gift of life, I thank you.
To the mineral nation that has built and maintained my bones and all formations of life experience, I thank you.
To the plant nation that sustains my organs and my body and gives me healing herbs for sickness, I thank you.
To the animal nation that feeds me from your own flesh and offers your loyal companionship in this walk of life, I thank you.
To the human nation who shares my path as soul upon this sacred wheel of life, I thank you.
To the spirit nation that guides me invisibly through ups and downs of life and for carrying the torch of my light through the ages, I thank you.
To the four winds of change and growth I thank you.
And for all my relations, my relatives without whom I would not live, who are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-creating our destiny.
One, not more important than the other.
One nation evolving from the other and yet each dependent upon the One above and the One below.
We are all part of this great mystery.
Thank you Great Spirit. Thank you for my life.
MitakuyeOyasin
Robyn:Let’s all take a deep breath. Thank you for sharing that.
Kevin:Yes, I can feel it. Every time I say that prayer I get emotional.
Robyn:It makes me think even more of the power of community. That loving and appreciating and honoring the stones, the minerals, all nations, all people. It reminds me of what we have here at our prayer wall. People wonder into our center, a prayer wall that represents all healing traditions, all people, unity and diversity. We have an African prayer, a Sanskrit prayer, a couple wheels and Buddha, as well as the Virgin Mary, who is so adored here in the Southwest. This is part of our tradition here.
I want you to speak a little about I’m related to everything. In your own words what does that mean to someone who is suffering from deep loneliness or depression?
Kevin:It’s true. In my work and what I see and you mentioned depression, is that all of these things we see as manifested illness or as psychological disturbance in my view is really a separation from that truth that we are related to everything. I believe that although there is extensive research and powerful medicine for depression itself, in that it is a biochemical thing that’s happening that I’ve seen the power of prayer.
Larry Dossey mentioned it as we interviewed him and the research he’s done on the power of prayer, and how that can change the biochemical makeup of the body and the neurotransmitters. I see these things working together as allopathic medicine, as spiritual healing, so all these things are interconnected and interwoven and I think those words are very important too, this idea of inner dependence.
This inner dependence is that we realize our dependence, that we are dependent on animals and plants and without them this would cease to exist. Then we realize that we are in relationship with them and how we are in relationship with them. I call it right relationship, which I think is a Buddhist term, but this idea that there is a right way to be in relationship and how do we know we are? Because things are working, we feel good and healthy.
Robyn:And we’re connected to nature, to our right livelihood. We’ve talked a lot in our series every month about returning to nature. It’s not just the outdoor nature but also our inner nature and connecting to that power within, our intuitive self.
Kevin:I call myself an intuitive and I like that word, but I think that also it’s powerful to know that we all have this gift. If you’re born into a body into this life than you are an intuitive. It is part of who you are. If you aren’t experiencing that kind of guidance of gut feeling, the feeling in general then there’s usually something covering that up. That is to be investigated and I think that’s what we’re talking about when I help people create clarity. I help them get rid of those blocks and covers through working with a myriad of characters.
Robyn:Characters or multiple personalities?
Kevin:Right. The dream yoga touches into that. When we have dreams we’re having all these vast essences of who we are and they’re all coming through to us. They’re happening right now.
Robyn:Yes, and to really have relation-ship with these multiple personalities that we have within us so it’s not a bad thing. We talk about light and shadow and we always have these casts of characters.
Kevin:That’s so true and mentioning shadow, shadow is such an important aspect of us because we are light and shadow and we experience light and shadow. We can see the sun comes up and goes down. We often think of darkness in this culture that it’s bad or scary but in many other cultures it represents the feminine, the mystery in these indigenous traditions.
Robyn:As you were speaking I was thinking, the power of community, like that’s the power of community of really honoring all aspects of self. So if you can recognize that power than how much more accepting are you of the larger community? The greatest communities on the planet there are always issues. There is always going to be multiple personalities within a community as there is within ourselves, but part of the Self-Care Revolution is how do we, through self-care, work with ourselves in a gentle, peaceful and honorable manner rather than the inner critic that can be so degrading?
Can you talk a little about communication tools to build community?
Kevin:Yes. We have teachings in this area but we’re kind of taught by osmosis how to communicate. We come into a family system and that system has its way of communicating. Often that way is dysfunctional because like we talked about, there is a lot of disconnect from nature. There are a lot of people that are not doing their life purpose, that are not living fully in this world or they don’t think they can, so they’re stuck in abusive situations.
Abuse is an interesting word because it is very dimensional and I think that some people don’t even realize the levels of abuse that are being perpetrated upon them or that they are perpetrating. So this idea of communication can clarify what’s actually happening. One of the main tools of communication is listening. Being able to really listen to people, which is what I think, embarked me on this journey of counseling and working on my Masters degree and moving forward in clinical psychology as well, because people have said to me since I was a child, you’re a good listener.
People feel that intuitively, that you’re really listening to them. Then you can reflect on what they said and that’s such a huge component of communication and taking that to a broader sense of being in community with the self and being in community with others, that one of the major reasons for losing relationship is they didn’t listen to me. They weren’t listening and the person can say I’m listening and maybe even reflect back some of the things that were said but were they listening with their heart? That’s what we’re talking about here.
Robyn:Do you want to provide an example of that?
Kevin:Sure. I think heart math actually has a really good way of understanding that. Heart math is a modality as I would call it that’s gaining in popularity. It’s really feeling into the heart. One of the original tools of heart math was to imagine an ear on your heart and it seems silly and I like silly things, but imagining an ear on your heart can take you out of what we call the left or rational brain and put you in a much more creative space.
That creative space is where we listen with our hearts and we can feel it. I believe that. When we are listening with our hearts, sometimes we don’t do this because we’re so empathetic and so connected to other people that it actually hurts us to feel the pain. So that’s an issue of boundaries and how to create better psychological and emotional boundaries. This really goes to the level of work it takes just to be able to have a conversation that’s effective.