Welcome to Azurae's Blog!

Azurae Windwalker is a Visionary Healing Shamanic Artist and Healer from Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Azurae is also a 35 year teacher of Practical Shamanism and Nature Spirit Energy Medicine. Her mission as a healer/teacher is to gently guide and inspire her students to access their innate talents for healing, intuitive wisdom, way showing and Earth keeping.

As a shamanic artist Azurae draws inspiration from her American Indian heritage, the Spirit in Nature and her spiritual artistic guides. She designs totemic petroglyphic art, Lifeforce Shield Protective Amulets and other shamanic art that is wonderfully energetic, mysterious and healing. Her work is collected by an international clientele.

Artist’s Statement: Shamen were the first artists. They created their art to benefit, help and heal their community. I seek the same purpose."

Triangular Smudging

Triangular Smudging

The next process that White Eagle wishes to impress on you is the discipline of smudging.  Smudging is the ritual purification of a person, place, or thing using the burning of sacred herbs such a cedar, sage, sweet grass, lavender, copal, or pine.  In class we use a mixture of cedar for purification and protection, sage for clearing negativity and lavender for bringing the essence of love and increased ability to journey.  I use sweet grass after sage for bringing balance, and the sweet spirits.  You can use a seashell, turtle shell, or a pottery dish for a smudge container.  Light the smudge and use a feather to fan the smoke over your body.
One student at my Nashville White Eagle School found smudging nearly saved her sanity and health.  She was a social worker calling on some of the most angry, depressing places in the city.  She keeps smudge in her car and uses it between calls to clear the negativity that cleans to her energy field like de-energizing psychic lint.  Just a tiny leaf of California White Sage stuck on a safety pin to burn in the ashtray of her car was a life saver.  Thus she could offer a clear, helpful and healing attitude to all her clients.  Try it!  For interstate and big city driving this safety pin trick is a must!  I certainly could have never brought the XAT Native American Medicine Society’s Ceremonial Drum into the exercise yard of Tennessee’s Death Row and held a ceremony with the Native American Circle there without a whole lot of sage smudging during and afterward!

A few years ago, the ancestors and the Little People gave the late Dorrine Running Deer, a fellow shamanic practitioner, a special triangular smudging practice for clarity and balance.  It goes far beyond to traditional practice of smudging.  Like the circular breathing, this practice helps to balance us between Earth and Sky.
Too many students of metaphysics get so involved with the top three gateways (chakras) that they forget the root, navel and solar plexus.  The top gateways of crown, throat and heart bring energy down from Father Sky.  The lower gateways of root, navel and solar plexus draw energy from the Earth into our energy body so that we can function in the here and now and manifest our good intent.  The heart draws energy from the Middle World in which we live and is the Shaman’s Doorway.  Too much attention to the top chakras makes for a real spacey person who may have good ideas but just can’t make it happen.

We were born to be in balance.  If we spend time in close communion with Mother Earth and Father Sky we are naturally balanced by their energies.  However, our dependence on false sources of energy, far away from the original source such as computers, television, video games, cell phones, etc.  weakens us and warps our natural energy balance.  Remember, simple is better!  So, you see, a triangular healing form to balance, add clarity and to help cement our Mother Earth – Father Sky connection is very important!
The first step in triangular smudging is to power up with circular breathing and affirmation.  See the affirmations on the following pages and choose one.  Or use a Psalm or the Lord’s Prayer or other such positive, God centered power building statements.  Light your smudge.  Set you intention for healing, balance and clarity.  Feel these qualities in yourself.  Open up to be a hollow bone for Spirit to work through.  Then blow the smudge smoke through the heart of the friend you are working on with the intention of healing balance and clarity.  See and feel the smoke clearing away any darkness from the heart. 

Have your friend hold their arms out to the side.  Next, in a clockwise manner, fan the smoke from the heart (to your left) to the tip of their finger.  Then fan the smoke in a triangle to the top of the head and back down (to your right) to the other fingertip.  Then fan the smoke fingertip to fingertip across the body to complete the bottom of the first triangle.
From there, fan the smoke diagonally down to the Earth at the toes, and then diagonally back up to the fingertip and across the heart to complete the bottom triangle.  You are moving in a figure eight direction except the pattern you are drawing is triangles.  Make your triangles nice and crisp because the sacred geometry is much of the “Medicine” here.  I also go up to the head and smudge of the top of the head at this point.

Now turn your friend around and do the same thing in the back.  You’ll make a figure eight movement as you draw two triangles joined at the base.  This geometric form works with the way energy comes into your body from Mother Earth, Father Sky, and environment is processed into vital life force.
The Triangular Smudge Ceremony is a great gift for a friend who is spacey, out of balance, needs to get a grip on reality, or has experienced trauma.  Later on we’ll learn how to use this pattern and add two other geometric planes to make a tetrahedron – which is the ultimate balancing form in Nature.  This Triangular and Tetrahedronal healing form can be followed with your own breath or by drawing the energy form with rattles, drums, feather wands or crystal healing wands.

Use these two simple disciplines of Practical Shamanism and you’ll find your first steps Through the Shaman’s Doorway very gratifying!

Azurae Windwalker

Azurae Windwalker
Shamanic Practitioner and Teacher