Toni Gilbert

Toni Gilbert, Transpersonal Counselor www.tonigilbert.com

Hi everyone,

Time sure seems to travel fast when you are busy. I try to put the skids on the ole “doing” thing but somehow things find me and beg to be done. Then, I am sure that there are things that would be bad karma to ignore. So, what’s a person going to do? My summer was filled with family, and friends, as well as canning and freezing of our garden harvest and tending to my pets…the flowers. Life is good and I am blessed.

The following a list of what I’ve been up professionally that might be of interest to you.

New Articles on Toni Gilbert.com

There are two new articles on the “published articles” section of my web site www.tonigilbert.com: Grandmother Moon which is about an evening of self-care when the full moon inspired me to meditate and visualize healing. Lewis took the above photograph from inside our two person tub, the night of my experience with the moon. I left that part out of the story.

The second article is about the therapeutic effects of the Breitenbush experience. It is aptly entitled Forest Immersion Experience: Mother Nature Promotes Introspection and Healing. This article was the inspiration of my co-author Lynn Keegan, PhD, RN AHN-BC FAAN a founder of the American Holistic Nurses Association. She visits our holistic organization in Oregon from time to time and has fallen in love with the Breitenbush experience.

Lynn will be our guest speaker this year at the Oregon Holistic Nurses Association (see dates below). She is the author of numerous books in holistic nursing . This year she will be discussing her newest book and interest, The Golden Room: A practical guide for death with dignity.

My New Book

I’m still hard at work on the new book about my family that has the tentative title of Images of Our Time: A history and pictures of a pioneer family.  I just finished restoring about 300 pictures that my grandmother, Lilly Wilson Curtis, took as professional photographer at the turn of the last century. She was a teacher and a photographer before she married my grandfather. In those years, you either had a profession or you married and had a family. She chose my grandfather (luckily) but she had her camera ready during their homesteading years and beyond. It is a treasure trove of images for our family and I think others will enjoy it too. I ‘m working on the text and it is all falling in line with a flow of synchronistic happenings…coming together in a magical way. So, it will be completed soon. The picture at the right is my grandmother’s sister, Abby.

My Published Books

Gaining Archetypal Vision and Messages from the Archetypes  The main aim of these books is to educate caregivers to the potential of learning to counsel with the archetypal images of Tarot cards (and other modalities that use the human archetypes.) For instance, I believe that Tarot cards can help provide a therapist or counselor with a pictorial assessment of the client’s state of mind. The cards illustrate the emotional investment a client holds and indicates various ways to help him or her to access inner levels of consciousness for insights and solutions.

How does that work? Basically, each of us has the same energetic structure that, not only gives us life but, also informs us on how to respond to life. There are many models of how this energetic structure is configured but the Freud/Jungian sits well with my experience: The conscious mind and the id take care of the world we see out there; the earthly level.  On one hand, the unconscious mind is a personal reservoir of experience unique to each individual. It is the structure of the psyche that autonomously organizes personal experience. Then there is the collective unconscious, also a part of the unconscious mind. It has a universal and impersonal nature. These levels of consciousness are identical in all healthy individuals. The collective unconscious accumulates and organizes personal experiences in similar ways, but it does not develop individually. Rather it is inherited, consisting of pre-existent energies known as archetypes.

If you know yourself at deep transpersonal archetypal levels, you can guide others to find these other dimensions of themselves. Using the archetypes is a transpersonal journey of great importance to your growth, development, and overall well-being.

During the counseling session, I am deeply involved in the process of active listening, becoming receptive to intuitive impressions and honoring the sacred by focusing my awareness on the synchronistic collaboration between spirit, self and other. I also have faith in the flow and trust that the creative process will unfold for the benefit of the client….and it does.

Oregon Holistic Nurses Association

On another note, the Oregon Holistic Nurses Association is holding its annual conference and retreat at Breitenbush Hot Springs in October.

Yours truly is heading up the Fundraising: In addition to a book sale and auction, I will be there with my cards giving Archetypal Tarot Counseling™ sessions to benefit the organization.

All holistic practitioners are welcome. Breitenbush is truly a healing place but it is also a place of teaching and a place of rest. Take your pick.

Book Review

I like to study religions not only for their historical perspective but for the perennial wisdom that runs through every one of the wisdom traditions. So, when the book Zealot: The life and times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan came out, it was a must read. The fact that the author is an internationally acclaimed scholar of religion was even better. Someone who actually puts in the time to study religions is, not only credible but, much better at explaining all the events in a way that is grounded in the reality of their research into historic data banks. Of course, I take in the fact that they are writing from their perspective/interpretation and are not necessarily bearers of the “right” truth of the actual events.

The book did not disappoint me. The first few chapters described the times that Jesus lived; the landscape, the people, and the culture. It was very much like today, with the various factions fighting for their beliefs. The fundamentalists clung to olden beliefs as if those truths were the only right ones and the more liberal factions espoused a new vision of truth. Both archetypal sides had people who were passionate about what they believed to be true. Such people are known as Zealots because they pursue their path with zeal…or conviction.  Of course “zealot” is an archetype and as such would have different levels of consciousness or development.

The author’s portrait of Jesus and others are vivid and believable.  As the story unfolds the history of the region is interwoven with the characters of the New Testament or the Hebrew Bible. For example, The author tells us that Jesus’ brother James, was a good and just man, who went to great lengths to keep Jesus’ teachings pure after his death. Paul, a major player in the formation of the Christian religion, saw things differently and added a few touches to help people understand the story…. or for political reasons.

All in all it is a darn good read and I recommend it to everyone….Christian and non-Christian.

Lastly, I find beautiful images on the internet. Sometimes they have a photographer’s name and sometimes not. If you are an author of an image posted here, let me know so I can give you credit. A big THANK YOU to all of the artists, for you improve our world with your art.

This and That 2
by Toni Gilbert

Life is good here in the Mid-Willamette Valley; the sun is shining, the birds are calling to their mates and there is a mighty flurry in the oak and cottonwood trees surround our property.

Lewis built our chickens a big pen with lots of grass inside so that they won’t scratch around in my flowerbeds. It can be quite disheartening to see the damage they do but, what can I say, they don’t have a clue about flowers. At this time of early spring, with no flowers up, I do occasionally allow them into my space because there are all kinds of baby slugs and newborn bugs. I figure it is just another way they earn their keep.

My brother, Tom Gilbert, is staying with us to recuperate from liver cancer. So far, so good, the most recent test shows no evidence of his cancer. I give him energy work, Tarot counseling and good meals complete with multi-vitamins and supplements along with a good dose of D3. He is reading one of Dean Sluyter’s books “The Zen Commandments” and a couple other equally enlightening books. He is learning to rest when his body feels tired and is noticing his guilt when he does. He is also out in Nature working in my very large yard.

The grandchildren are growing at an enormous rate and I feel that our time together is going too fast.  My grown children, complete with their challenges, are physically strong and mentally and spiritually healthy. Who could ask for more?

Workshop Offering

If you are thinking of getting certified in Tarot Counseling, now is the time to get signed up for my Archetypal Tarot Counseling(TM) course http://www.tonigilbert.com/workshops/. It is three years long and is focused upon the use of Tarot cards in wellness counseling. You need not be a nurse to benefit from this perspective. We meet physically three times. We begin at the end of June. This year we will meet in the Temple of Claire and then will meet for the next 2 years at Breitenbush www.breitenbush.com .

Also free on the workshop page: A print out of a chart that compares the Chakra system with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

My Book in Progress

My great-grandparents on both sides of my family pioneered in the Oregon/Washington territories. Currently, I’m working on a coffee table book of my maternal grandmother’s photos. My grandmother was a professional photographer and a teacher before she married at 27. After which she stayed home…but had her camera. She left a treasure trove of photographs from homestead life. This one is of my uncle Lewis who was born in 1912. I have been working with Photoshop to restore the hundred year old photos. It is a fun project and I expect to have the pictures and the text done by the end of this year. Then I will check with my current publisher Schiffer Books and we shall see…..

Bay Area Tarot Symposium

It was good to see new and old friends at the Bay Area Tarot Symposium. I was so impressed with the line-up of speakers that I wrote the article San Francisco Bay Area Tarot symposium: An Intuitive art Comes of Age for Perspective, magazine The Associations Humanistic & Transpersonal Psychology October/November 2012.

This article is about the maturation of the Bay Area Tarot Symposium and of Tarot as an intuitive art. It is also a call for Tarot cards to be recognized as a profound tool with which to move our consciousness toward a more transpersonal vision in mental, physical, and spiritual health. If you are interested in giving Tarot reading or counseling a try, there is a sidebar that lists a few top tarotists and contact information.

You might also be interested in my article Astrology, Tarot and Maslow: Using the Esoteric Arts for Self-Development for Perspective magazine of the Associations Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology.

In this article I use the Christine Payne Towler’s New Moon Tarotology system, Maslow’s pyramid and my evaluation method for the archetypes in counseling. The use of these esoteric tools together with an intuitive interpretive process gives you an idea of how to use the archetypal energies that are available to us at any given time.

Holistic Nursing

I’m really proud of our fledgling Oregon Holistic Nursing Association, an organization that I helped birth into being. Please join us at our 7th annual retreat and conference October 13-16 at Breitenbush Hot Springs www.breitenbush.com. The theme this year will be “Facilitating Conscious Transitions Through Holistic Practice. ” For more information and registration, please go to the events section of our web site: www.oregonholisticnurses.org. You don’t need to be a nurse to attend, all holistic practitioners are welcome.

My personal site www.tonigilbert.com (#43) and the Oregon Holistic Nurses Association web site (#34) were mentioned in Best Nursing Sites of 2012. Both, I and Deonne Wright the current OHNA director, had a hand in developing www.oregonholisticnurses.org site. Go to the sites and click onto the blue logo to see who else is there.

I’m seeing more of an easy interest in the use of Tarot images in wellness counseling. I have promoted its use for over 10 years to holistic nursing, humanistic and transpersonal psychology and the alternative community. It was rough going at first and, in the nursing world, sometimes my requests for an interview or presentation were ignored. However, the like minds in the profession kept me going. So far this year, I was invited to do a radio interview with holistic nurse Elizabeth Scala (see Radio) and next, on the third Saturday in May, I will present “Using Archetypal Symbols as a Therapeutic Tool” to the AHNA Oregon Chapter of holistic nurses at Portland Community College. One of the challenges of holistic nursing is to demonstrate the change you want to see in the world.

Radio

Two new radio shows are up on my personal site at www.tonigilbert.com click on “radio”. They are Tarot Works Radio Show with Jeanne Fiorini where we discuss the body/mind connection, archetypes, healing, and personal potential. And my first nursing radio show Living Sublime Wellness Radio Show with Elizabeth Scala.

And a third special offer from Global Spiritual Studies my book “Messages from the Archetypes” and a radio interview not offered on my web site. This one is with Linda Marson skyping me all the way from Australia. Check it out on http://globalspiritualstudies.com/shop/shipping-rates/books/messages-from-the-archetypes/.

Poetry

Many years ago, I wrote poetry as a healing exercise when I was working through childhood issues and gaining spiritual perspectives. Lately, I have been publishing them through the newsletter of the Oregon Holistic Nurses Association. You may see some of them by going to the web site www.oregonholisticnurses.org and clicking onto the newsletters. I will share one with you here. I wrote this in my journal after observing and being taught about Zen by my small furry guru.

Ode to the Cat
Oh, to be like the cat.
She cares not for where
She’s going
Or what happens to her.
The cat cares nothing for where
She’s been.
She lives in the moment
And is her own best friend.
Toni Gilbert, 1978

By Toni Gilbert, ASN, MA, ATC

There are many paths to enlightenment. One such path is the inner journey, the dreamer’s journey, a journey that consists of levels of consciousness beyond what we know as waking reality. These levels of consciousness contain the images of fierce and gentle creatures, young and old selves, past and parallel lives as well as a multitude of abstract multisensory experiences.  In this great little book, the author Robert Moss teaches the reader to use the mysterious dreamtime. He touches on recognizing symbols and synchronicity and leads us through the dreamer’s world, showing how to connect the dots between our inner imagery and our life stories.

In the introduction Robert Moss reminds us that we are more than our body and brain. He shows by examples that we have stories going on in our heads during our current circumstances and that those stories guide us in our life.  He says that somewhere along the line of living, we forget our life’s purpose and get lost. It is then that we run into all kinds of trouble. Because bad things happen to us, we lose our vital essence and we may feel bad and want to die. It is during the tough times that a part of us may actually succeed in dying. This is what is known to shamans as soul loss and to the mental health professionals as dissociation. From a lifetime of independent scholarship and experience and a quarter of a century of dedicated practice, the author gives the reader an antidote to this problem.

Robert Moss begins by giving us the history and practice of shamanism. Basically, the shaman is a spiritual practitioner who has mastered the art of journeying beyond the body to communicate with spirits and souls of both the living and the departed. He/she does this to facilitate their healing. Typically the shaman are dreamers, who receive their calling from dreams and become frequent travelers to the Dream time. For instance, they may use their dreaming to diagnose a patient and select appropriate treatment. Moss describes the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung as a shaman of the West and goes into detail about how Jung used information from the unconscious mind to craft a depth psychology in which dreaming is central.

Moss provides us with a history of dreams and perspectives from several cultures from the Old English and Scottish to the Hawaiian. As a plus, the author writes about, Carol, his dream partner of twenty years and tells how they work and dream together.

There is a section on understanding soul loss. Briefly, he says at our interior, we have a multitude of selves and we must build helpful bridges between them in our self-healing. Dreams reveal these selves that are aspects of psyche that may have been dormant or missing from waking consciousness. The dream itself is your doorway into a past situation that caused the soul loss. Reentry into the dream is important to reclaiming your vital energy and becoming whole.

The author helps the reader learn to use techniques and images of the tree in raising consciousness and in grounding. The use of projection of the animal spirits is also covered, illustrating the power of transfiguration in the reshaping of our energy bodies into animal bodies for the purpose of using their instincts for life learning. One chapter is all about horses in our dreams. There is a discussion about the condition of a horse in a dream as symbolic to the state of our bodies and our vital energy.

Moss’ book discusses soul loss in terms of trauma in early childhood. Another chapter’s theme is how to find and talk to the lost inner child ensuring that they return to your body in present time. There are tips on how to welcome the lost part home and how to use dreams after the recovery. The author tells of inner guides and mentors, which come to our aid during the dreaming.

The author describes how to use ritual and dreams in deep ancestral healing; healing all the family across multiple generations. The author states that our ancestors live in our bodies and that their templates may control our habits and behaviors unless we recognize and break the pattern or mold. The goal is to cherish soul connections to wise ancestors, and even have relationships with them, but we must start by clearing unhealthy legacies and energy attachments.

Part of the book is devoted to entering a secret library, a portal, from dream or memory that will allow you to move in your imagination to a place where you can access any kind of information that interests you, and any subject that attracts your attention. You may even be able to look in your “Book of Life”, the book that will help you know more of who you are, including your connection with personalities and sacred contracts in other lives, past and future. The reader will also learn how to use Tarot cards to trigger images of past lives and to “free our imagination and expand our understanding of the many aspects of the self.”

Then there is information on Dream Archaeology, which involves melding the best tools of analysis and scholarship with the experiential techniques of active dreaming. Moss claims that we can enter the life situation of personalities in the past or future who may be related to us in various ways—as ancestors or descendants, our larger spiritual families and as embodied aspects of ourselves living in other places and times. Moss claims that we embark on these journeys of the imagination “becoming more than we ever were before, embodying more of the Greater Self.” He ends with a discussion on “spiritual enthronement” and says that growing the soul requires courage and an open heart to take the creator’s leap and bring something new into our lives and our worlds.

Throughout the book there are multiple meditation exercises. For example, there is a journey to the cave of the animals and one about birds that is used for time travel. The chapters also include many stories to entertain and teach the reader. Not only does this book deliver, but it is easy to read and the stories and meditation exercises illustrate the author’s dreaming processes. This book is a “must read” for the intermediate student of the inner realms, the experienced practitioner looking for more.

Toni Gilbert, ASN, MA, ATC is a transpersonal counselor with a background in holistic nursing. As a professional with a formal education in nursing, psychology, and transpersonal studies, she offers clients an array of healing arts techniques to enhance wellness and prevent illness. She is the author of Messages from the Archetypes: Using Tarot for Healing and Spiritual Growth, published by White Cloud Press and Gaining Archetypal Vision:A Guidebook for Using Archetypes in Personal Growth and Healing by Schiffer Books. She has written for national and local publication. You may see her published articles on her personal web site www.tonigilbert.com She is also the founding director of the progressive Oregon Holistic Nurses Association www.oregonholisticnurses.org  serving California, Oregon and Washington.

Archetypal Tarot Counseling™ Phase I
Where and when: Breitenbush Hot Springs, Oregon—April 15th till 18th 2012

Hi Everyone, After a few long cosmic detours, I am finally getting back to my Tarot Counseling workshops!
This three phase certificate program explores contemporary and historical information relevant to the use of Tarot cards in wellness counseling. Tarot is a centuries old system of cards that anyone can use for identifying mind-body issues and emotional states. The wellness counselor teaches people about holistic health, that includes how to make use of your mind-body connection and multiple levels of consciousness.
Phase I: This workshop begins with three days of self-development using the archetypes of Tarot. After reviewing a brief history, you will begin the study the artistic symbols found on the cards. By the end of the workshop you will: understand how the upper and lower levels of the archetypes represent innate forces in the lives of all people; know the principles of dream interpretation and how it is used in the counseling process; and learn to use your intellect and intuition to realize your own gifts and talents.
The course design makes for a creative and interactive experience. Participants will give readings to each other and observe demonstrations by the workshop leader. Course work for the certificate includes after workshop mentoring by certified ATC readers and counselors.
Phase II: Counseling Others, Phase III: Professional Tarot Counseling (dates TBA)
More information/application: www.tonigilbert.com click “workshops”
Breitenbush Hot Springs, Oregon: www.breitenbush.com
Hope to see some of you with me! Be well, my friends, Toni