Episode #36

Episode #36: Grandmother Jyoti Psychedelic Leadership Podcast.

Duration: 01:56:45

Laura Dawn: My name is Laura Dawn, and you’re listening to episode number 36 of the Psychedelic Leadership Podcast, featuring a very special conversation with renowned spiritual teacher and vision keeper, Grandmother Jyoti, sharing her powerful wisdom for these times of

change.

Grandmother Jyoti: All the spiritual leaders that I’ve walked with through the years are saying this is a time when we are going into a birthing process. So, it’s going to move to the feminine, to take that leadership of life as it flows into its new form. And so, we’re in a moment where the masculine and the feminine are finding a different alignment with one another, where the masculine is learning not to defend, but to protect life makers. And that there is a balance and a harmony now that will come between the masculine and the feminine as we move into these new times. We’re in a moment of truth and this truth is in our face. It’s the truth of ourselves looking at us. It’s the truth of our family systems looking at us. It’s the truth of our cultural systems looking at us. It’s the truth of our world system. looking at us. The instruction is you can’t go around the truth, you can’t go through the truth or try to manipulate or negotiate the truth, you must feel the truth, must let yourself feel this truth. And as that happens, it will then push you into your spiritual maturity, which is really, we’re in our moment of maturing ourselves and not imposing my truth. You see, that’s the challenge right now is “I got the truth, and I’m going to tell you the truth. I’m going to impose the truth. I’m going to fight for the truth.” You know, I’ve never understood why people fight for peace. It’s like, be peace.

You know, one of my elders told me a long time ago because I’m an activist still in just different forms, but you know, “What you fight is what you become,” she said to me. When I let go of the outer world instruction and started to let the inner world instruction be the driving engine, then all of the circumstances and all of the synchronicities and those magical moments when I met just this right person that would then wake me up to the next part of what would be the cultivation of consciousness and awareness in me, that’s how the life flowed. So, I always say don’t get ahead of your medicine. You are your medicine, so follow that which knows itself. And it’s about trusting that which lives within you. The Great Ones know what we need in order to fully awaken to our authenticity, and that’s the call right now. And we really must stay in that moment and call in our full authenticity to make it through the keyhole, if you will.

And Native American Church was one of the first places I learned how to pray. I learned how to sit on my knees all night long. I learned what protocol meant because protocol is not like rules. Protocol is literally Earth’s law coming through that accentuates life. And it helps us keep the power of that prayer that got started and handed those protocols from the original time you prayed. So, when you keep those protocols unbroken, when you sit down and open that prayer like the earth asked you to do, then that full line of all those prayers before comes in with you. And our prayer was unity and peace amongst all nations. That was the prayer we were carrying. And so first She said, “Wake up,” you know, “work on yourself to wake yourself, then come together and help others wake up. And then live together in community with that intention being at the basis of it all.”

Laura Dawn: According to the Kogi prophecy, we are collectively moving through 13 years they call the great cleanse. The Kogis say that the great ending will fall into the beginning in 2026. In this episode, Grandmother Jyoti shares remarkable stories that help us understand the wisdom within these prophecies and the power of walking in prayer, and points to the necessity of stepping into alignment with our authenticity, as this is a time of reckoning with our personal truth. Now, I know the word prayer doesn’t resonate with everyone. I mean, in all honesty, it didn’t resonate with me for a very, very long time, until I sat with Ayahuasca, and I learned what it meant to pray. And I actually invited Jyoti to come on to this show because I specifically wanted to talk to her about the power of prayer. And you might recognize her name and voice from the Wisdom Keepers panel that I featured as episode number 30 on this podcast, and I just wanted to spend more time with her and soak up her wisdom. And similarly, Jyoti shares that she also really learned what it meant to pray when she arrived at the Native American Church and sat with elders in teepee, communing with peyote cactus.

Now, Jyoti Ma takes prayerful living, truly integrating what it means to walk in prayer to an entirely new level. And that’s why I just love being in her presence because it’s just so palpable. So, if the P-word, the prayer word doesn’t resonate with you, or has too much religious connotation, or just too much baggage associated to it, swap it out for another word. Use the word intention or whatever other word works for you. Don’t get hung up on it, just tune in and feel the frequency that Jyoti transmits through this conversation. And I know this is a long episode, but it’s definitely one of my favorite conversations so far. And it’s worth listening to all of it, because honestly, it starts strong, and it ends just as strong. I’ve listened to it a few times already, and I’m sure I’ll be listening to it again. And so, I also broke up the conversation with an interlude that Jyoti wanted to share. It’s this beautiful recording of her offering a prayer. And you can also listen to this on YouTube as well. It’s called “Walk On”, and I’ll include this link in the show notes. And on that note, I’ll leave this episode off with something a little different this time. It’s not a song, but it’s another beautiful recording called “Prayer for Peace”, by Elah & AuSierra, and it’s from their album called La Medicina, which I highly recommend listening to. It’s super beautiful, they have lots of other beautiful medicine songs on there. And I’ll also include their link in the show notes as well, where you’ll also find a link to my “For Medicine” music playlists for psychedelic journeys and beyond.

For those of you who don’t know who Grandmother Jyoti is and just what a powerhouse this elder is, I mean, she is truly a remarkable woman. She was one of the founders of the Center for Sacred Studies and was also the founding member and convener of the Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers that you might have heard of. And I didn’t know this, but she shared at the end of this conversation that the initial circle of Thirteen Grandmothers has really spawned a whole movement. And there’s now over something like 70 councils of Thirteen Grandmothers convening all over the world. And so, Jyoti considers herself to be a Vision Keeper and a seed keeper, which she talks more about. And she shares that after the Council of Thirteen Grandmothers took on a life of its own, she received new guidance, a new vision, a new seed that has led her to launching a project called The Fountain, which I highly recommend checking out at thefountain.earth. And their mission is to restore an economic model that is based on reciprocity and collaboration, guided by nature and the sacred.

Now, before we dive in, I want to invite you to reflect on the prayer, the vision you are holding and cultivating for your life and for humanity. Are you walking in alignment with your prayer every day? Prayer can take on a million forms. We can write our prayers, sing and dance our prayers. This is how we weave ceremony into the fabric of our everyday lives. And if you feel like sharing your prayer with me in person, I invite you to join me alongside other speakers like Aubrey Marcus and Duncan Trussell in Las Vegas in November for a psychedelic conference called Meet Delict, where I’ll be offering a talk on exploring the intersection between creative problem solving and psychedelics for the leaders of our time. And you can get a discount on your ticket and that link is in the show notes as well. All right, I just can’t begin to express how much of an honor it is to be able to sit down with someone like Grandmother Jyoti, whom I respect so much, and be on the receiving end of her enormous amount of wisdom. Some of you know the journey that I’ve been on with this podcast and how much effort and dedication it’s required. And honestly, every single moment of challenge and struggle on this learning curve has been so worth it for moments that I’ve been able to share with Grandmother Jyoti. Moments like this make it all worth it. And I am so thrilled that I’m able to share this potent conversation with you as well. Without any further ado, here is my conversation with the one and only very, very special Grandmother Jyoti.

Grandmother Jyoti: How are you doing?

Laura Dawn: I’m doing good, you know, navigating so many waves of change, just like the rest of humanity.

Grandmother Jyoti: Yeah. As the Kogi say, we’re in the ending times. So–

Laura Dawn: It feels like the grand upheaval right now is what it feels like. And the training is learning how to stay present in the middle of the whirlwind is really what it feels like. How are you doing?

Grandmother Jyoti: Well, the Kogi told us the ending would fall into the beginning in 2026. And when they gave us this prophecy in 2013, you know, we were entering into 13 years of the great cleanse. And so, we are deep in it now. And they said it’s important to watch the ending as it falls down, so you stay informed, but to stay focused on that which is breaking through. And that which is breaking through will be carried by those individuals and organizations and movements that are based on original principles of heart, reciprocity, collaboration, unity, and all life is sacred. And so that’s where I’m putting my focus right now. The further instruction from spirit was to stay in the present moment, just like you said, that’s the instruction. Because if we are in the moment that we’re in, this present moment we’re in, and our mind runs ahead to see what’s going to happen or tries to negotiate or manipulate it, then it might meet fear, and bring that into the present moment. Or if it looks behind itself, it might bring regret into the present moment. But if we stay fully present in the present moment, and receive what the divine brings to that moment, and embrace it, sometimes that’s the aha moment. Sometimes that’s a challenging moment. Sometimes it’s joy, abundance, overflowing, everything can come to that moment, but the Great Ones know what we need in order to fully awaken to our authenticity, and that’s the call right now. And we really must stay in that moment and call in our full authenticity to make it through the keyhole, if you will. And the clock is ticking. And yes, things are getting stronger and stronger and stronger to shake us all awake and make us take a moment to stand in that present moment and make a choice so we’re conscious as we choose, huh?

Laura Dawn: It’s interesting, and I love that you invoked this word authenticity. And I think it gets thrown around a lot these days. And so, I’m kind of curious, how do you conceptualize this notion of really living in authentic alignment with our core truth?

Grandmother Jyoti: Well, I think it’s an individual soul work. And if you stay in that present moment, and you receive what’s brought to you and you fully are committed to your own full awakening into who you really are at the core of yourself, that’s what I mean by authenticity. And that’s work. It’s life work. It can be a lifetime’s work, to move through the karmic entanglements and the lessons that karma brings us so that we can get to the space of where our dharma is starting to present itself. And right now, globally, the world’s soul is in that kind of choice moment, you know? Will we step out of a world that has to be right and wrong and divided and opposing itself and harming itself and gone to sleep in itself? Or will we choose to be in that moment where we’re ready to do the work? We came here to do the work so we can leave a different kind of legacy. And all of us knew what kind of time we were going to jump into. So, we chose to come here, there’s no victim story anymore. But what she says is, it’s time for all the light walkers, the light-bringers to fully activate themselves. What does that mean?

Well, you know, in my world I can only report from my walk because that’s my experience, you know, and what’s been touched by that experience. And I know that from early on in my life, I was an activist of one sort or another. I’m 73 now so, you know, you can imagine back in those days when I started this as a young girl in the south, where girls were seen and not heard, where a lot of that kind of law and things that opposed us and suppressed us in our authentic being of self. So, we had to wake up from that space. We had to wake up and realize, “Whoa, I am living in a world where I was being abused, so why am I choosing to do that?”, and really start to embrace what I needed to do to heal things inside of myself that needed attention. And that it wasn’t just for me, but it was actually, it’s for generations. There’s a generational line that runs through every single one of us. And so right now, we’re in the middle of clearing a generational history, a generational wound, a generation that wasn’t as evolved as we’re stepping into, we’re going through an evolutionary process with the earth. As She evolves, so do we.

You know, it’s been told to me where this is her sixth extinction. So, she’s done this five times before. And when I was in India, and going in my pilgrimage there, I would go to sacred sites and temples and they would have a clock on the wall, and the clock would be from 12 to one would be 2500 years and from one to two would be another 2500 years, until it went around for the 26,000-year cycle. And at the very end, there’s this little sliver, they call the Kali Yuga, the end of a cycle, the end of everything cages down on itself, so it can arise out of itself to start the next 26,000-year cycle. So that’s what we’re in right now. We’re in that ending time. You know, if we can step back from it, and realize it’s not because something went wrong, we don’t have to judge it, or guilt anybody about it, or try to fix it, you know. We don’t need to rescue the earth. We need to honor where She is in Her cycle. And we’re in it with Her.

So, as we come to this ending cycle, if we can be aware of that, then we will realign with the Mother Earth herself, who can give us instruction and has been giving us instructions since the original time. And She gave those instructions to Her original people. And She shared with them how to care for this creation so that that reciprocity of life could flow naturally and all abundance that’s in this creation could be shared by all. And that worked. And then we got to the place where a bad seed was planted and we started getting off and we started separating ourselves from nature, thinking it was out there, and it was there, and we were here. Thinking we could control nature, thinking we could, you know, put things in a box and economize them somehow another. And that’s when we started going to sleep. We started losing our souls’ path as a people here, as a race here, as a species here. Because we are nature itself with legs on walking around, we are part of this. And ever since the pandemic struck, you know, it’s really clear if we can take a moment and step into that kind of perception and look at Earth, Mother Earth and see where She’s not well and start to attend to what She says she needs in order to bring that health back, restore that nature itself, then our bodies with heal, our minds will heal, and we’ll step into a different attunement for ourselves, if you will.

Lately, some of what the elders are having us look at is how we got put in this box by this oppressive thought that we put in motion so many years ago, through time, because we went into the Gregorian calendar, which is false time. 13 Moon calendar goes with the cycles of this earth, and they say if we can come back to living with those 13 moons, that it will naturally put us into right alignment with ourselves all the way through, then we’ll be in harmony internally, you know. So, the prophecies have prepared us and now the prophecies are instructing us if we’ll just listen. We’re graced by that.

Laura Dawn: I want to ask you more about what some of these original instructions are for people listening. And before we get there, I’m kind of curious, what does the prophecy say about what 2026 looks like into the transition into 2027 and the beginning of the next cycle and beyond? Does the prophecy speak to that very moment in time?

Grandmother Jyoti: Well, I’ve been walking with prophecy for a large part of my life, and I came into it, not even realizing I was walking with it myself and my community. And we’ve been in service to and grown by the Eagle Condor prophecy, where some of the Kogi are speaking about. Prophecy, in my world, she shows you where you are, and what’s needed. She doesn’t give me the instruction of what that will be about next, you know. I mean, there are certainly amongst our original people, some of the very old lines that carry some of that story in much more detail, but it’s something they hold very private and sacred because we’re all making choices, and this is a system of the reality of free will. And so, there are many different layers of consciousness residing here right now.

And, you know, we’ve all been working for the last 30 or 50 years for sure, with the realization that if enough of us walk into that higher consciousness, it’ll be a tipping point and pull us through. So, we’re at a critical moment right now and I think the most important thing to know is, wake ourselves up because consciousness is contagious. You know, you can’t make somebody conscious. You can’t. It doesn’t work that way, any more than you could go out and make the rosebush bloom quicker than its own DNA will bring it to the blooming process, you know. We’ve got to understand that about nature. So, we have to sit down with nature, be a bit more humble in our approach to all of this and really go and access deep, deep listening, which is some– I know, you wrote me and said we’re going to talk about prayer this morning. And for me, that is a process of deep, deep listening.

Laura Dawn: Yeah, it seems to me like you’re dedicating your life through the projects that you support, through your Center of Sacred Studies, and also with the Thirteen Grandmothers to really help spread the message of these instructions for how people can essentially wake up. And so yeah, I’d love to talk about prayer. And if there’s anything else that you’d love to share around how people can deepen on this path and listen, and what does that look like for us to be able to receive these instructions from our elders? And what instructions are we receiving to be in deeper, harmonious alignment with ourselves, with each other, and with this earth? I mean, it seems like prayer is a really big aspect of that. And are there other instructions that are specific that are being given right now that you’d love to share?

Grandmother Jyoti: Well, I think I want to enter that discussion with it’s really about coming in with our curiosity, not our need. No, no, that’s a Western thing. If we brush that off and come down to the curiosity that can be the seed of that, then we start to enter this discussion with a different attitude. And so, when I look back at my life, for instance, and when we started this walk and intentionalized our prayer with the divine and with the Divine Mother, because we’re instruments of what She calls forth, and She calls herself She of Many Faces, and She’s been that way with us. And so, if I look back at that, we didn’t know where we were going, we didn’t know what we were being called for, all we knew is that there was something very strong that was calling us all together, to sit down in a spiritual community with that kind of intention to step out of the box of throw away reality, that we wanted to declare our sovereignty through longevity, that we were committing ourselves to waking up together. And we knew waking up was sometimes messy, so we wanted to do it with kindness. We wanted to allow ourselves to bring our children into this world through that kind of understanding with a way of life that would bring more harmony and balance. And they would receive that understanding by just living it with us.

The throwaway society we were stepping out of was about you know, I get a car and when it wears out, I get another car. Same thing with the washing machine, maybe relations, I mean, you know, it goes on and on because when we have an attitude of a throwaway society, we enter it in a very different way. We enter relation with everything in a very different way. So, with that said, if I look back at my life, what she said, as she started putting– I realized a few years ago, she was making a statement through us as we walked our prayer. And our prayer was unity and peace amongst all nations. That was the prayer we were carrying. And so first She said, “Wake up,” you know, “work on yourself to wake yourself, then come together and help others wake. And then live together in community with that intention being at the basis of it all.”

And then, we were there, and we got our land up in the Sierra Foothills here in California, in 1995 and really intentionalized that prayer and a walk as a community. And we didn’t know how we were going to do that either, you know. We took one step and stayed in that present moment, and She sent what we needed. And then we just followed the practical side of that and the logistical sides of that, the legal sides that we had to put in motion to create a community and then grow a business and an educational system that would carry some of these teachings in the far reaches that it has.

And then in 1998, that was in 1995, and in 1998, and during ceremony, she came, and She said, “I’m going to give you one of my most precious baskets. And in this basket are some of my most treasured jewels. Those jewels represent lines of prayer that go back to the original time. Do not mix them, do not change them, protect and keep them safe and walk them through the doorway of the millennia, and hand them back to me, I have something we’re going to do. Now, we did not understand this instruction, but up our 14-mile lager road to our place where we lived on the top of this mountain in the Sierra Foothills came the elders that would help to initiate us in those lines of prayer, show us the protocols of Earth that were given by those plants, by the earth herself as protocol for how to live life in a sacred manner. How to maintain the diversity of these different lines of prayer as well because that diversity, once embraced is truly all of creation activated. Yeah?

So, for almost a decade, that training went on with all of us. It was not easy. We had to really– They put us through many, many, many ceremonial rituals and works and fasts and pilgrimages and all kinds of things that would awaken this understanding of the protocol of life inside of ourselves so we could live in that original way and have that way of life be a way of life again. And shortly after that, then we had 9/11 occur. And 9/11, we had set up all these ways to really protect this basket, and when 9/11 happened, it fell down. And so, we created a church, the Center for Sacred Studies, so we could really care for these Earth-based ways of prayer in the right way. And then, we really started getting the information, and it’s a much longer story, that it was time. Many of us were receiving messages to gather up a council of Grandmothers. And so, we went.

I was on my way to Gabon, Africa when this came up and the grandmother there said, “Yes, I’m getting a similar vision and it’s time to do it now.” And I was on my way to the Amazon, where we had a home that was part of our community for 22 years, and took many of our community into the jungle, so the jungle herself could really indoctrinate us and help us wake to ourselves. And so, I showed it to some of the women that I’ve been working with there and they had recently signed a letter down in the Jurua region of the Brazilian Amazon that said, “It was time–“. Well, I’ll back up for a minute because really, when Bernadette, when we were in Gabon, had showed us the letter that she had just signed with the Ayahuasca curanderos in Peru, that said, “It was time to declare all indigenous peoples to declare their sovereignty. And it was time to call the people, to call them into play in regards to how it was not okay anymore for people to go into their pharmacies, into their jungles and take their medicines without understanding them, and without permission. And it was time to declare that at this moment in time, and it was time now.” And then when I went to the Amazon, they had signed a similar letter with six tribes in the Judua region there and so that was the validation. Because as you walk it, then it shows you things and then there’s a validation, there’s synchronicities. There are things that show up that give you the feedback that you’re listening correctly. And there are elders along the way that you can bring this to and say, “Am I hearing this? Am I hearing this correctly?” So that way you stay humble in your march.

So, we convene the grandmothers, the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers in upper state New York in 2004. That’s when we handed her back the basket and it took us on a march around the planet. It was quite a remarkable time in 2004 when I remember Rita Blumenstein who’s Yup’ik from up in the coal country of Alaska, who just passed a little over a month ago now. She was a bright light in this world. And she sat down at that gathering and she said when she was nine years old, her grandmother came and sat her down and said, “When you are old and gray like me, you’re going to be called to sit on a council of 13 Grandmothers. And I have prepared 13 bundles with sacred stones and white eagle feathers. You must care for these until that time, and when the time comes, pass a bundle the each of the grandmothers and take one for yourself and sit down and know I’m standing behind you and the times we’ve been talking about have arrived.” And so, we didn’t know at the time that there was prophecy held by many, many of our indigenous people around the planet that said there would come a time when the 13 grandmothers would come to shake the world awake.

And so, for almost a decade, we walked with the Grandmothers Council. We helped to organize, to raise the funding, to listen to what they were needing, and tried to organize and carry that out and be in service to that prayer. And then it was time for them to fly on. And a couple of years prior to that, I received the next seed, she calls it Her sacred seeds, and it was called The Fountain. And it had a mission which was to restore an economic model that was based on reciprocity and collaboration and guided by nature and the sacred. And so, I caught this vision and I went down to meet with the four original people in Colombia. You may know the Kogis, they’re one of the four. We’ve worked very closely with the Kogi, the Wiwa, and the Arhuaco of those four. And I shared with them the vision we were getting, and I shared with them a symbol that I’d caught for kind of the original template of The Fountain. And one of the Kogi elders said to me, “Where did you get that?” And I said, “Well, in my meditation line.” He said, “Because that’s one of our oldest symbols and that’s exactly where The Fountain should sit, and we should sit there too.” And so, of these three that I’ve just mentioned, there has been a representative guiding us.

Now, I don’t know if you know of the Mamos and the Sagas of the four original people, for those that maybe are listening and don’t. These are the spiritual leaders of these four original peoples and the Mamos, they say they’re either seen right before the birth, and then the mom and dad go through rituals to prepare for this higher consciousness that’s coming, or they’re seen in utero and recognized through ceremony, or they’re caught when they’re birthed. They’re given then into the hands of the elders into the caves, and they live there, do not see the light of day until they’re nine years old. And when they’re nine years old, they come out and they undergo some kind of evaluation to see if that consciousness is fully open. And if it hasn’t, they go back in the caves until they’re 18. And I’ve worked with some that have been in the caves for 28 years. So, you can imagine the consciousness of these people.

So, when we went down to meet with them, they went into consultation, and they did work. And when they go into consultation, sometimes it’s a shorter time, sometimes it’s several days, three, five, seven days or longer. But when they’re in full consultation, they’re in the source of it all, receiving this direction, and they don’t, eat sleep, or drink water during this time. And so, they have been giving us– they’ve gone into consultation ever since we met with them that first time when we first received the vision with The Fountain, they’ve given us the direction, we’ve walked out the direction, we’ve held ceremony to celebrate and have called gratitude for what we’ve learned in those steps, we get the next consultation. This is how it’s been for nine years going on 10 years now to bring The Fountain to the world stage where we can really be an instrument for the Mother Earth in this critical moment of choice.

So, when I look at how this prayer unfolded, you see, it grew us. It centered us, it cleansed us, it awakened and opened us. And now it’s at a place where when She gave this to me, she said, “This will be the dot at the end of your sentence.” I thought, “Well, what does that mean?” So, I went to some of my elders, and one of them just threw her head back and said, “Well, then She’ll give you another sentence,” you know. I don’t know but I can see now that this statement that the mother herself is trying to bring into the world is coming through this many years, 35 years of walk in this prayer, and not knowing where it was going, embracing the unknown, and it all. “You know, how do we enter into that place? I think when we start to have the idea come to us that way if we brush off our curiosity, and we embrace getting to be fully who we are, and shedding all the false parts of ourselves we took on because of traumas we’ve been through, our family systems we’ve been through, our cultural systems, our world systems, you know, we’re in a huge cleansing, like we spoke about at the very first and so that’s where it begins.

I remember when I was younger and I worked in Texas for 13 years with street kids, really hard situations, really challenging situations with riots and all kinds of things occurring. And I’ve been sent in as one of the first women to run a home there that had been set up originally for kids that needed to be adopted. And then everything had started to shift in our social structure and, you know, we got birth control measures were put in place, we got foster homes put in place, a lot of this kind of thing took place. And so, what had happened was there was a lot of dumping of children into this institution that they were sending me into. There were about, I don’t remember exactly how many kids but probably maybe 300 kids and staff to take care of them, but they had gone into riots. And because they had kids there that had the murdered people, they had runaways there and they had everything in between and it was a crazy, chaotic time. It was a huge teaching field for me, a wonderful study if you will. But what I learned was, you know, I really wanted to empower the kids. And so, when I got there, I arrived, a lightning bolt struck the transformer on campus through a storm. And so, I’m this little one running around in my raincoat going into each of the cottages where the kids were ages six to 18 and saying, “Please gather your kids, do a headcount, I’ll be back in a minute.” “Well, who are you?” “Well, I’m your new superintendent, and I’ll be back in a minute.” That’s how I introduced myself there. And we worked really hard for the kids to take ownership, “This is your home, what do you want this to look like?” And we went through a lot to get to that space.

You know, it’s like, Carlos Castaneda talks about it like sitting on your front porch, and there’s a bad spot on the porch that will always be a bad spot. So, don’t sit on the bad spot, you know? So, it was a study of was this institution sitting on one of those bad spots? Or could we, through our own efforts, and creativity, and heart, open to something higher in ourselves? And the kids did that. And just as they got that, they had started to own, they had started to get into better places in their lives and back in school, this aggressive, angry chaos was gone, then government decided to sell this institution to the mental health, out of the juvenile delinquency programs and into mental health. They promised everything for what was left there but I had a feeling. I got all the kids but about five kids that were able to leave, be placed in a good place, and the other five we couldn’t get them placed.

Little Ronnie who had come to me and he was either catatonic or in a rage and wasn’t able to be social, wasn’t unable to go to school, just a hard, hard place. Most of these children had horrible abuse situations, and scary, scary lives, most of their lives, torturous lives. Ronnie was one of these. We got him a job at the billing station at the front of the gate. He made relations there, he was doing well and about to go back into mainstream school for himself, and then this happened. And they started manhandling him and wouldn’t let any of us that knew him and what he felt safe doing in order to help him through this moment of transition. And it was just such a horrible– They put him in lockup, and they wouldn’t let us get there and he was reaching for us. And I walked over to my office, and I was just in tears. And I was praying. I was like, “So, Creator, what was it that I didn’t see? What could have kept this from happening to little Ronnie? Can I learn from this so that it can make that worth something for Ronnie?” And the voice came to me, and it said, “You can take your pebble, and you can throw it in the pond here in this reality and it’ll make ripples but eventually it’ll come still water again. But if enough of you go into the inner labyrinth, and climb that ladder and throw your pebble there, it will be a wave that washes over this reality and then that will change and shift.” And so that took me to the Jung Institute and it taught me how to go into a process of individuation, to go in there and start to unpack all this luggage that I carried from our lifetimes like I was speaking about, and start to get down to “What’s me? Who am I really inside of here? Not who I’m trying to pretend to be or some persona I have learned that will help me stay safe in the world or this or that, but who am I?” That’s what I mean by that word authenticity.

That’s when I came to prayer. And that prayer in that awakening process took me into ceremony. And Native American Church was one of the first places I learned how to pray. I learned how to sit on my knees all night long. I learned what protocol meant because protocol is not like rules. Protocol is literally Earth’s law coming through that accentuates life. And it helps us keep the power of that prayer that got started and handed those protocols from the original time you prayed. So, when you keep those protocols unbroken, when you sit down and open that prayer, like the earth asked you to do, then that full line of all those prayers before comes in with you, and it opens you. In the West, we talk a lot, you know. I learned that words work if we consolidated things into our words that the words could be more powerful and our understanding could be clearer and our focus could be more directed. I came to understand that prayer was, you know, Lily Tomlin says, “When you pray to God, they call it prayer. When God speaks to you, they call it schizophrenia,” you know. I think that’s a really good voice of what it was like some years ago. I think we are evolving out of that understanding and opening to dialogue with creation, dialogue with self, dialogue with the sacred that lives in and around us and that comes through us. So that’s a long answer to your question but did I touch upon what you were looking for?

Laura Dawn: Yeah, I love it. And for people listening, you know, for me, as well, I would say, I didn’t actually resonate with the word prayer most of my life. I used to hide in the bathroom when my parents forced me to go to Sunday school. That sort of institutionalization of religion never resonated with me until I started drinking Ayahuasca and I had these moments of, “Oh, this is prayer. This is what it means to pray.” And I’m curious, you know, in everything that you’re speaking about, I feel like the big message is how to embody a more prayerful way of life, essentially. And so, for people listening to this, who maybe don’t resonate with the word prayer, maybe there’s other words that you can share. But for people who are like, “Okay, yes, I am feeling this call to embody a more prayerful way of life.” And that’s kind of why I was wanting to talk to you almost like offering somewhat of a prayer workshop, you know, like, what are the elements that we need to be with? And I think that you’re also speaking to this place of not knowing, that it’s a lot of bringing your curiosity. And so maybe we could just talk a little bit more for people listening who do want to engage more with prayer. And I’ve heard you say Mother, and She, and is that synonymous to you with Great Spirit, source, creator, universe? What’s your sort of conceptual framework around that?

Grandmother Jyoti: Well, that’s a good question that we could probably unpack in a lot of different ways, you know. I went through a Kundalini awakening process that was really strong for 13 years. And when I was a little girl in Texas, I had a hard relationship with my mom. So I would go and find a weeping willow tree because it had these long, you know, certainly looking– It was magical to me. I later would come to find out that was Kuan Yin’s tree. But it would always have an arm that I could curl up in as a young girl too, and then Jesus would come. And He didn’t have on robes and all this, He just hung out with me. I really get now that He was teaching me how to do out-of-body experience because He would have me go fly with the clouds and things like this. And I would come running home to try to tell people about it because I thought everybody had this experience, and then I got in trouble. You know, you’re exaggerating, got sent to my room, these kinds of things.

As the Kundalini awakening came on, and that Kundalini is the mama Shakti and the way they speak about her is that she sits coiled around the base of our spine three and a half times. And sometimes during a lifetime, she may want to fully awaken and if she does, that’s going to be many years of her going through the body, the temple itself, and burning out karma and disease and disharmony so she can clear that temple. My Kundalini teacher would say it comes in three phases. The first is there’s a fire that purifies and burns all free. Then there is the cooling where the Yogis would cut their tongues, and there’s this divine nectar that can drop down and you swallow, and it can give like a rose oil or powdery like form on your skin and if you have a sore, it’ll just disappear. They call that the cooling form. So, the third, where that divine presence that’s beyond all gender, that divine presence can step fully into form and walk around and be in service than to this creation.

And so, as my own soul evolvement was preparing me for my soul work in this world, this lifetime, it got to a place when that my beloved then, that walk with Jesus had been so strong since I was a little bitty girl. And it was based on things that didn’t have to do with the church form that we had gotten caught in and boxed into. It had to do with a mystical experience and a nature that I was so attuned to. But at a certain place, the Divine Mother started becoming very, very strong in the presence of my life and I was struggling with that. And He said to me, “I came through the heart of my mother, and so shall you.” And so, as my work in the world took me into walking for the last 35 years amongst our original people globally and learning more about those amazing and wise and deep, deep teachings, I came to understand through many of them that they will speak about how there is a grandmother that is dreaming us now and is dreaming us into our new dream, even as we are moving in the flow of that dream. This is the Gaia. This is the feminine presence here. And all the spiritual leaders that I’ve walked with through the years are saying this is a time when we are going into a birthing process, so it’s going to move to the feminine, to take that leadership of life as it flows into its new form.

And so, we’re in a moment where the masculine and the feminine are finding a different alignment with one another, where the masculine is learning not to defend, but to protect life makers. And that there is a balance and a harmony now that will come between the masculine and the feminine as we move into these new times that we’ve been talking about here that have been prophesized and we’re in the middle of moving towards what they call the new dawn, the new dawn that’s just arrived. And so, I think that that divinity can take all different kinds of forms. That’s the beauty of our diversity. So, whatever is going to resonate and open your heart into that place.

You know, it’s like when you have a small child come up and put their little hand on you and say something just broke down to you, you just kind of melt in that moment, everything else disappears and just there’s this moment that there’s not a word for it. It’s a wordless place but it’s beautiful. Or sometimes we have that moment with the awe when we’re watching a sunset. Or we’re in a dream or we’re in ceremony like you’re talking about, there’s something that wakes up a knowing in us that that sweetness, that sweetness is our goodness and that lives in every single one of us. And we forgot. We went to sleep for a while, and we wake to it again. And it takes on different voices.

You know, there’s a book that Celeste Yocobani wrote, it’s called, How Do You Pray? It’s a little bitty book but it’s quite profound. And she went and got spiritual leaders all around the planet that would answer that question, “How do you pray?” So I’d recommend it to people to get it. It’s a very valuable book. I found it that way myself. And Brother David Steindl-Rast, he says, “What lifts you up that helps your attitude open in a broader, more open, unconditional way? Maybe that’s fishing,” he says. “Then fishing is your way of prayer.” You know, that place where you forget yourself, and something else enters. That’s prayer. That’s the prayer. Normandi Ellis said, “I pray with my feet.” So, she takes pilgrimages and she walks. And many of you will see, many of our original people sometimes when they are really wanting a prayer to be strong, they walk this United States or they walk in a pilgrimage that’s a holy walk, maybe in Colombia where they call the black line. There are many pilgrimages, places where people put their prayer through their feet, you know. So, I think it has to do with how each one of us takes a moment to just sit and [think] what inspires? What allows you to get out of the way and allows you to–” I’d like to give you an example actually if I could…

Laura Dawn: Please.

Grandmother Jyoti: …about maybe just the different stories will help touch somebody and they’ll go, “Oh, yeah, I get it now,” you know? And I wish we were here so we could each share in the circle, because for me, I like to sit in circle, and everyone is an aspect of myself. So, when I get to hear all of the voices to the answers to the questions you’re asking me, then we’d truly be able to see something, you know. But I was teaching, my husband and I were given this formula called the Stargate Mystery School that we opened. It’s still operating some 30 years later and it’s in our different communities that we have internationally. And, you know, I was looking at one of the classes and it was like, we get up at seven in the morning, and we finished late at night so they’re long, intense, intense days. We were over in Europe presenting this. And then one of the students that was in our class, Michael Stillwater, he came to me, and he said, “Jyoti I’m collecting. I’m going to some of the spiritual teachers, I’m asking them, would they get involved with a project for hospice. And could you go to that place where the Divine Mother comes to you and see what She would want to say to people in this kind of transition? So, it could be physically you’re dying, or maybe you’re at a place in your life where you’re in a death birth process that’s that intense.” So, I said, “Well, come tomorrow morning, before our day starts, and I’ll see,” you know. I go and I sit, and I just get still and move out of the way and then She can come in and speak. And so, she did. And he took the microphone off and we went out and I did the rest of the day.

About a year and a half later, he sent it back to me and he had put this with music. And it was the first time I ever, maybe one of the only times I got to be on the other side of the mother’s transmission, you know, her message is a transmission. And it was a very significant moment for me with her, you know, because this isn’t about me, this is about that divine speaking. And so then, they took it and they added on scenes of the earth in order to really bring that into a meditation and they put it all together into what they call graceful passages, and Gary Malkin produced that. And it’s got people like Ram Dass and Thich Nhat Hanh. It’s got Kubler-Ross. I was quite humbled that I ended up in a circle this way. But when I started tuning in to what you had said about prayer, how would I even, you know, start to be with people and just offer curiosity and look at different ways to look at prayer and a life of prayer, this story kind of came to mind. And so, I thought I might share with you and those that are watching today, how that happened and what the message was, and how it got presented. And it had nothing to do with me. It had to do with me being able to be humble enough to sit and be still and let those first words come and see what would be constructed.

Walk On Prayer by Grandmother Jyoti:

“Good morning, Grandfather. I entered this life a way back and put skin on to walk two-legged in this creation, and what a glorious time it was. It taught me about breath and about sense and feeling and caring through my heart. And I walked on around that red road, looking and trying to understand more about the mystery and the secrets She holds. And you spoke to me through the wind, and you sang to me through the birds, and you brought challenges forth so that I might listen to the message you bring me more sincerely. And I kept walking down this road, and I came round the bend, at the middle of that curve in the road, and I began to find a secret in the spirit of myself. And still, I walked on, sometimes blind and deaf and sometimes with pain, but I fought with my fears, and I embraced my unknowingness, and still, I walked on. And as the door of the Great Spirit world came closer, my fear loomed up inside sometimes, but something called me forth. The morning star rose with each day and my prayer became a centering. And, still, I walked on, until I began to hear the song of the mother, and Her arms embraced me so, that, instead of walking, she carried me right to the door. And as the door opened, I heard Her song and Her song lifted me up so I could soar.”

Laura Dawn: That is so beautiful. That is so beautiful. There’s so much that I want to ask you, oh, my goodness. I mean, I heard you also say the word transmission earlier, and to me, that’s also so much the experience that I’ve had, like, when I’m in prayer, this open channel just opens within me. And I feel almost like the seas are parting and I’m able to directly communicate with the source of all, creator, you know, whatever word resonates for people. And from that perspective, I’ve also had this understanding that it requires preparing our body as a vessel and our mind to be able to enter these really powerful states of prayer, and also a container, you know, a ceremonial container. And I’m just curious if there’s anything that you want to speak to, from that perspective. Is that something that resonates with you as well, you know, the body as this vessel of being able to channel our prayers and preparing our body and taking care of our bodies and our minds, and also the space that we pray in?

Grandmother Jyoti: Absolutely, you know, absolutely. That, for me, is what we’ve been talking about today, and especially with our plant medicines, and how they’ve come up. You know, they say that during a time of great transition, like we’re in right now, the dolphins, the mushroom people, they all come forward to help us during these times. And so, a lot of our medicines have come out of their own lands, to travel around and help the human race right now to wake to itself, to do exactly what you’re saying, to really look. The body is our vessel, the body is our temple, and when we haven’t been present in it, and we haven’t taken care of it, then it’s kind of like a house that we didn’t tend to. So, we have to go in when we first start waking ourselves, a lot happens to help us clean this temple, to clear this temple, to take things out of it that aren’t ours. To do that, not only in the physical body but the other bodies around this temple. Because a lot of trash and things from others that we’ve collected by just walking on the planet, in this very chaotic moment where the shadow is flying like crazy around us, that many of us that are waking are waking to more sensitivity and all that so we’re like little sponges, and we didn’t know we were, and we just soak it all up. And we don’t know that we’ve done that even, or what to do with that, you know.

In the old days, when you were seen to have that kind of open system, you’d be seen early on and you’d be given to the medicine woman or medicine man or you’d be given to that one that is going to train you up and get the vehicle aligned with your soul and your spirit so that you can consult. This is school. This is Earth as our school. It’s a school route, really where spirit is trying on the skin to see– It’s learning too, you know, it’s learning too. And so yes, then the plants start to get the emotional bodies cleaned and cleared. And then you get to a place when some of that work has finished and then you realize you really need a spiritual seat, you’ve really got to come to that place where you start to have practices. And that can be lots of different paths from the source and but all of them reach a place where they call upon practices so that the mind can get trained up because our mind, in India, they call it the crazy monkey because it jumps all around everywhere. And most of the time we get pulled into the river of Chitta which is a Chitta, Chitta, Chitta, Chitta, chit. It’s all these thoughts and stuff.

One time I did a practice where I sat down, and it was before I had a computer, I think it was at a typewriter. And for six hours, I just recorded my Chitta. I just was the one recording all these thoughts. “Oh, I can’t believe I’ve decided I’m going to do this for six hours. What was I thinking? I got to go pee. My nose itches.” And then some profound thing would flow in, and I’d just record it. What I realized at the end of that exercise was I was the one recording the Chitta, you know, that I could choose not to just jump in this river of thought and be swallowed by these things. There was a sacred witness that lived in me, and that witness could observe and be in life, but be not of it anymore. And that brought me out into a different state with my consciousness, my attitude, started to receive things rather than right and wrong and good and bad, started just to see things of what is because what we’re really doing now is coming full circle, back to a whole system. And that whole system is what is really turning itself on again, you know, through us and with us. So yes, I think all of this work is to do that.

When we get those practices in– You know, mine, because of my Kundalini took me to Kundalini Maha Yoga for 20 some odd years of full practice. The longest mantra work that I did was 600,000 mantras for the work that I was carrying in the world, particularly right in the beginning of the work with the Grandmothers Council. I wanted our community to have the highest level of work with that. So, our practices help us to throw that pebble in that higher pond, and our practices help us to access a higher level of our perception and reality, and to do the work there. And when we do the work there, then it falls down into here in a very different way. I found that access made a very different work for me. But, you know, it’s a study. I like to say things– If you’re asking that question that’s on a spiritual path, you’ve got a really good question that will bring you more than one answer, then that’s your study. But it’s a good question.

Laura Dawn: You mentioned earlier, so would you, from your perspective, say that plant medicines can teach us and show us how to pray?

Grandmother Jyoti: You know, the plants are intelligence, and this intelligence of nature is a high, high intelligence. And yes, so when it comes to you like I was sharing, they say these medicines are out here to help us right now. And there will come a time when they’re going to go back home and we’ll only be left with the holy songs that they left with us and the protocol of a way of life, and how to live. And that once we ingest, that that intelligence is always available, always available after that. And so yes, it wakes up the intelligence that lives in your body because the body is part of Earth form. And there’s an intelligence that starts to align with that intelligence, and then it opens our heart where another level of intelligence lives. And when it opens that intelligence along with this full system, then we start to surrender. We let go of our ego needs and our attachments and our fears, we start choosing love, instead of fear. You know, we did a practice inside of our community as we were waking ourselves at one point, every time we saw something that we weren’t sure what to do with, we would ask the question, “What would love do?” And that intelligence that lives in love is the core of all of this life. And so, we’re really coming back to the core of who we are and our plants are out here to help us remember all of that, and to use protocol, because then we’ll come to a way of life where we can all live together and we can unify in our dreaming.

Laura Dawn: I’d love for you to share a little bit more about these protocols. And I’m also curious, are there protocols that can support prayer? Is that what you’ve learned in a teepee? What are the protocols that you’re speaking to for living in right relationship to this earth?

Grandmother Jyoti: Well, the original protocols are, you know, they’re presented in many different original nations would have a different way of speaking to what those protocols are, that the earth gave them. And then they would apply those in their daily lives and that would maintain the balance. At the core of all of those protocols shared in these different diverse ways are reciprocity, collaboration, heart, unity, and all life are sacred. You know, like, if you look at when the protocols for, say, a Native American Church meeting, there are certain ways that we get ready for that meeting, there are certain ways that, because of protocol, I need to take my tobacco and ask the roadman if he will run this meeting for me. There are certain protocols that once the meeting is happening and the teepees, they’re up, there are things we had to do to get the wood ready and to get the sacred food ready. These are all part of the earth protocols in order to honor all these parts as sacred, for the one that is sponsoring this meeting, for the prayer they are asking to be supported. So, we’re, as a community, coming together through these protocols.

And then there are certain times of the night when certain prayers are offered up, that marks a certain part of a response to the prayer of the sponsor. And before midnight is when we’re doing a lot of the healing works and the letting go and the releasing work so we can get to this other part of the prayer that’s coming towards that morning water time. And where that water woman comes to sit on her knees behind the water that’s lined up with the fire and catches the pearls of all that came throughout the whole night in answer to this sponsor’s prayer. They say leading up to it, you may come to all the challenges and all of the things that make you not want to do it anymore because that’s your work. They say when you put, think carefully. When you say yes to prayer, then it’s in motion, then you’ve got to complete it. You’ve got to stay with it until it’s planted, or there’s a consequence. So, when my prayer has completed itself and planted itself, then there’s a time of watching to see how it’s going to restructure and reorganize my life around me. It’s not something I do necessarily. It’s something I show up for, right?

Laura Dawn: It’s almost like going into the spirit realm and imprinting the field that then coalesces into manifest form is one way I kind of think about it.

Grandmother Jyoti: Yeah, and each of the ceremonies have different protocols, they have different ways of opening that altar, and closing that altar so that everything can be taken care of, and they’re following the protocols. Again, just to remind everyone, they are how the earth said, “If you’re going to walk this way, with this line, care for it this way, it will bring the strongest.” And that’s why bringing these lines unbroken from that original time that when we open them, and we get to sit in these ways, that we are getting to sit in a way that’s been held from the original time and the power of all that’s happened until now is in the room with us. And that brings a different kind of reverence in the way that we walk up to these medicines, you know because we’ve been so imprinted and enculturated into a very oppressive culture that colonized everything around us, right? It’s what broke us from our nature. It’s what broke the protocol. It tried to break the protocol, but our original people have had resilience and courage and they brought that through. So hard way, so much what they had to deal with, but they brought it through unbroken here.

And now, what She says is every one of us has cultivated a line from our root. And if you can come to the world table and identify that line, then those original people there will help us know how to weave this tapestry that is coming together to show us the new dawn that’s arriving. So yeah, for me, that’s– I know it’s kind of a hard. It’s a different kind of concept of looking at things. When you go through that colonization things, you can go into things to see what you’re going to get. So, you’re still an extractor. You’re still a consumer. You’re still coming in with that attitude and energy. If you just come in out of reverence, because you’ve been called, something woke up and you don’t even know why you’re supposed to be at this ceremony but there you are, and you come and you just sit to receive, then something else happens. You know, it’s like when I went into the jungle, I was there for almost two years before I really spoke out unless they asked me. I really wanted to learn the nuances of the culture, the unspoken things.