My friend John Riggs just published ClearCut – The Wages of Dominion, a book that is both beautiful and terrible – it documents, bears witness to, clear cutting in the Northwest United States. John is facing the same problem that a lot of writers and artists are facing now – how to promote your work during a pandemic when you cannot go out and meet and speak with people. Consider buying his book to support the important work he is doing and his witnessing for the Earth.
John, a photographer by trade, starts the book with a guided meditation, guiding us through an invitation to enter into our complicity, then looking for a way forward, searching for the pathways of making things right, through forgiveness and then to the choice. John’s exhibition prior to ClearCut – The Wages of Dominion, was “Entering Old Growth – Meditations from the Ancient Rain Forest of the Pacific Northwest.” While most of the images in ClearCut are stark, black & white photos of forests that are reminiscent of World War I trenches, the aftermaths of battlefields, or tragic natural disasters, he reminds us of hope, now and again, like the growth that occurs on stumps, by including for contrast some of his color photos from his previous exhibition.
I can relate to John’s journey through the beauty of the forest only to feel one’s soul has fled one’s body upon stumbling across clearcut forest. When I graduated from college, I received a backpack as a graduation gift, bought a Greyhound Bus ticket from Chicago to Seattle, and spent 2 weeks solo backpacking through some of the land that John documents. I entered the forest at Sol Duc, hiked up over the ridge, and walked down toward highway 101, planning to go up to Forks and out to the coast. As I came out of the National Park and into the National Forest, I had to walk through miles of clearcut forest and it was inconceivable to me how anyone could use the forest in this manner. I won’t even try to put it into words – in fact, there is no need to, just look at John’s photos and you will feel it.
John is a poet and a healer as well as a photographer. He guides us through a meditation on who we are and how society is the way it is, and how we destroy ancient forests for our convenience and economic growth. To sit and bear witness with the destruction of a clearcut forest is to hear a message.
“In this vast and sudden transition moment there is a message coming our way. It is not my message; it is our loving mother, the living planet Gaia speaking. Speaking directly to us, speaking through many stern voices today, in many languages, shaking us all to wake up. They are all saying the same thing: ‘despair is the enemy, not others.'”
There is a terrible beauty in the book, but it is also a book about destruction and the selfishness that arises when we believe that the world is a thing for us to use and abuse at our whims. The mindset of separation and dualism, of us and them, naturally, or perhaps we could say unnaturally, leads to conflict, strife, destruction, and war – war between humans, but also the war of humans against nature. This mindset of separation is what allows us to treat other people as “things” and to treat the natural world without love and caring.
“ClearCut is an apt metaphor for our current human condition, and this exhibition is a guided meditation, a journey through despair to recognition and acceptance of our personal complicity in the fatal human character flaw of dominion. We pay a brief visit to the waystation of guilt and blame, and then on to the discovery of an urgent message our mother Gaia has been trying to deliver to us for generations: that the evolution of human consciousness must continue beyond dominion into communion if She – if we – are to continue receiving the gift of life and passing that gift along to our children and grandchildren.”
John Riggs, Photo by Ed Nelson
John is a hero as well as a photographer, a documenter, a witness, a poet, and a healer. In Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the hero ventures off into an unknown world – for John that was into the beauty of the ancient rain forest – but he found an abyss there, a dark night of the soul, the clearcut destruction. Campbell taught that as the hero or heroine returns from their journey, back into society, they find that the wisdom of their message is rejected by society. Will we reject John’s message he is bringing us from Gaia, our Mother Earth – or will we go through the stages he outlines, through guilt, grief, atonement and reparations so that we can make a choice to follow the path of making things right?
ClearCut – The Wages of Dominion challenges us, shows us the end result of our separation mindset and invites us to move from dominion to communion.
Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) speaks on initiation and becoming medicine, joined by David Kopacz, MD at Joseph’s home in New Mexico. This video features an initiation ceremony in which Joseph tells the story of eagle-man who is initiated into becoming a true human being by the ancient one. The idea of becoming medicine is developed in the book, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality by David R. Kopacz, MD & Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow).
You can watch the video through my website. We have a couple of other videos we will be releasing soon…
What a great week – Earth Day and World Book Day back to back!
The Earth gives us so much to be thankful for and her beauty is even more apparent and more easily appreciated during these times of a more inward focus. It is easier to hear the birds and working from home I look out my window often to see Stellar’s Jays, Chickadees, Juncos, and today I even saw an Audubon’s Warbler!
I’m grateful to have been able to bring forth, in these books, what is within me and to release this out into the world.
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” (The Gospel of Thomas, in The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels)
A Bowl Full of Ideas for Inventive Minds, Joseph Rael (BPA) 2009
Joseph and I are working on our next book together which will be a book of initiation and instruction for 10-12 year old children, drawing on Joseph’s experiences and what he thinks it is important for human beings growing up into this world to know about the world and themselves. We are calling it, A Bowl Full of Ideas for Inventive Minds. More to come…
May the books of all of the authors of the world contribute to realizing our inner spiritual humanity, our outer spiritual democracy, and helps us to remove obstacles and division to allow us all to live in peace, peace within our hearts and peace within the world.
This is the third overview of Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, writtenwith Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow). Many of the concepts in the book seem apropos to these viral times of the pandemic. Here is a synopsis of the book in one long run-on sentence:
We start with an emptiness, a loss or a longing, a wounding or disorientation and this leads us into seeking. We embark on wonderful and terrible journeys, we descend in to the darkness in the center of our hearts, which is the center of the medicine wheel and we realize that our hearts are medicine bags, filled with sacred objects. Finding and receiving these sacred objects we learn to see light in the darkness; we are fully-filled with sacred objects and this fulfillment leads to us spilling over, returning and giving to the world the sacred medicine that we have found within ourselves. We realize that it is not our personal medicine, because the wisdom of these sacred objects of the medicine bag of our hearts teaches us that there is no self and other, it teaches us that we are all connected, it teaches us that we have a responsibility for all beings and the land and the cosmos and that we are all One.
Here is an overview of Part III of Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality.
RETURNING/GIVING
Returning to the Land
When we begin our return journey, it can be difficult to find home. Odysseus took ten years to find home in the Odyssey, after he had already spent ten years at war in the Iliad. When we left home, in our seeking, we thought we knew what home was. Now, on our return, we find that we may not fit easily back into “home.” This is because our home has become bigger than we thought of before. As Bilbo told Frodo, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
Joseph Rael describes coming home to Picuris Pueblo, after 36 years away, he said that he “rediscovered myself!” To be indigenous is to be “of the land.” While many native peoples understand the sacred relationship with the land, going through a process of initiation opens one’s eyes and heart to see that the land truly is our Mother Earth and that we should be in a proper relationship with her. We are made up of Mother Earth, our bodies, molecules and atoms come from the food that we eat and the food that we eat comes from Mother Earth. After passing through initiation, we realize that the land is our home.
Drinking from the flowering Light of Mother Nature, Joseph Rael (2005)
Spiritual Democracy
We realize that there is no such thing as “other.” In Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD Joseph said, “I am my brother’s keeper.” For returning war veterans we taught that one must shift from seeing “others” to seeing them as “brothers and sisters.” This naturally leads to spiritual democracy where we realize that we are all one, we are indivisible, and that it is up to us to work for justice for all. This is not just for people of one country, but we must work to become “planetary citizens,” even “cosmic citizens” Joseph tells us.
Spiritual democracy is an antidote for the current divisiveness and radical “othering” that is occurring in politics in the world. To dehumanize another is a very dangerous thing and the xenophobic fear of the “other” can lead to our country ripping itself up into smaller and smaller shreds of sub-groups of us and them. Spiritual democracy can help us move beyond what Martin Buber calls an “I-It” relationship to an “I-Thou” relationship and even to a sacred “Essential We.” We need to heal the rifts that are being torn into the fabric of the national and global community. This can only be done by realizing that we are each other’s keepers ― we are all in this together and we all are one.
Earth Child of Spiritual Democracy, Joseph Rael ( 1997)
Refounding A Living Spirituality
The subtitle of the book is Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality. A living spirituality is a process of becoming, an always evolving path. Anthropologist and Catholic Priest, Gerald Arbuckle, writes of the importance of refounding in any organization. He says that institutions periodically lose touch with their founding vision and they require a refounding person to get in touch with the founding values of the organization. It seems we are in such a situation now. Arbuckle tells us that refounding synthesizes the authentic calling and mission of the organization with the realities and needs of the current time. This is different from fundamentalism, which is a rigid attempt to return to some fantasized golden age by blaming “others” for the current problems. Fundamentalism only looks backwards and is exclusionary, while refounding looks backward and forward and is inclusive. Arbuckle writes that we face “a global epidemic of fundamentalism both religious and political,” (Fundamentalism: At Home and Abroad, 28). He describes a typical fundamentalist leader as “a populist, homophobic, charismatic, authoritarian man who likes to bully,” (15). As an alternative to fundamentalist narratives he offers refounding narratives:
“Refounding is a process of storytelling whereby imaginative leaders are able to inspire people collaboratively to rearticulate the founding mythology of an institution and apply it to contemporary needs through creative dialogue with the world. The purpose of refounding narratives is to find a positive way out of trauma by allowing people to reenter the sacred time of their founding with imaginative leaders who are able to rearticulate the founding mythology in narratives adapted to the changing world.” Refounding narratives are “regenerative” and “differs from a fundamentalist narrative” which is “closed to dialogue and responsible dissent,” (Arbuckle, 93-94).
Fundamentalism is about seeing differences, whereas a living spirituality is about seeing similarities and interconnections. This begins in your own heart and then spreads outward to transform national and global cultures. In Becoming Medicine we look at the lives, words, and works of many holy people who have put forward a vision of religious unity, such as Gandhi, Narayana Guru, Rumi, Wayne Teasdale, Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee, William Keepin, and Matthew Fox. Those who drink from the fount of Living Spirituality realize that the only real religion is interspirituality and intermysticism. There is a story about Indra’s Net from Hinduism, that there is a vast of web throughout all of reality comprised of multi-faceted gems which reflect each other. Rather than a materialistic view of ourselves as isolated organisms, we can imagine ourselves as reflective and interconnective beings.
Out of One, Many, D. Kopacz (2019)
Finding Your Inner Secret Garden of Paradise
Matthew Fox was expelled from the Catholic Church for teaching creation spirituality, which rejected the idea of “original sin” and instead focused on the “original blessing” of being incarnate in sacred relationship on the Earth. Just like Adam, he was expelled from the garden. What creation spirituality teaches us is that we actually cannot be expelled from the Garden, that it is right here, in our bodies, and in our sacred relationships with other beings and the Earth.
This is the ultimate transformation of suffering, to find the Garden of Paradise within ourselves – an ever-renewing source of revitalization for ourselves. In tasting this medicine, we are becoming this medicine, for ourselves, for our human relationships, and for our communities, ecosystems, and for the planet, herself.
Heart Radiation, D. Kopacz (2019)
The Secret Garden
Joseph says that we should pay attention to children’s stories because they contain hidden wisdom that the elders pass on to the next generation. We explore a lot of peoples of transformation’s stories throughout the book and we end with a telling of Frances Burnett’s Secret Garden. In this story, two young orphans, who are of about the age of initiation of 10-12 years old. In the story, the children are initiated into a living relationship with the land, they borrow from many different sources of spirituality, and they go through a process of healing – emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Colin, a young boy who had never been out of the old mansion in his life goes through a transformation. In the story they are talking about “magic,” but we can consider that the same thing as the way we are speaking of “medicine,” a healing and transformative force. In a ceremony in the garden Colin leads the children and animals, and the old gardener through this chant:
“The sun is shining—the sun is shining.
That is the Magic.
The flowers are growing—the roots are stirring.
That is the Magic.
Being alive is the Magic—being strong is the Magic.
The Magic is in
me—the Magic is in me.
It is in me—it is in me.
It’s in every one of
us. . . .
Magic! Magic! Come and help!”
Heart Radiation, D. Kopacz (2019)
Becoming Medicine During a Pandemic
Albert Camus wrote about a fascism in the guise of The Plague. Fascism is a hidden influence of our book and we hope that Becoming Medicine can be part of a cure for these times. The spread of a mental contagion is similar to that of a viral contagion – people can end up infected, spreading a disease, without even knowing they are ill. Camus wrote, “All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”
The risk is that if we do not go through initiation into becoming a true human being (as Joseph calls it) or if we do not go through the process of individuation (as Carl Jung called it), we are at risk of spreading the pestilence of fascism as well as the COVID-19 Coronavirus. The sprouting fascism and fundamentalism of our times and the spreading viral pandemic can be a call to adventure for us, a call to enter into the disorienting and often painful process of initiation. This can be a call for us to transcend our “self-imposed limitations,” or as Camus wrote, “What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.” We have no idea what the future will look like and we have no idea of what this “call” is asking of us.
Joseph Rael told me, “The thing I should have said in my books is that everyone already has their medicine. The way you become a medicine person is you practice who you are because you are already medicine. No one gives it to you, you are already it.”
Camus wrote, “I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing,” (127).
Seeking, Finding, and Becoming ancient wisdom and a unifying healing force and then Giving this to all equally is what this world needs right now. The book, Becoming Medicine, is as long as it is because of the dangers of these times we live in. Originally I was conceptualizing the book as being about initiation, about the first and second parts, but as history has unfolded around us, I realized that we needed to speak of the silent land who is our Mother, we had to speak of spiritual democracy as an antidote to divisiveness and “othering,” we had to speak for a renewed and refounded sense of unity and non-duality of all beings and all life, we had to remind people that if they go into the darkness, the darkness of these times and the darkness of their own hearts, they will see the light in the darkness and they can, care-fully, bring back this light from the inner self into our current darkness in which we are all fumbling.
Blessings for Drinking from Morning Star, Joseph Rael (2000) – text added, dictated by Beautiful Painted Arrow, transcribed by David Kopacz
“Words create worlds.” These are the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, here is the full quote, remembered by his daughter, Susannah Heschel:
“Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness — or evil — into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.”[i]
Crow Flying through the Cosmos, D. Kopacz (2020)
Remembering the Past & Learning from History
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana)[ii]
Are we witnessing a rise of fascism and totalitarianism? Many say we are, and it is worth looking at what these words mean and if they apply to our current situation, which Rebecca Solnit calls a linguistic crisis.[iii]
Are we justified in using such a strong word as “fascism” for the language and ideas that are being tossed about under the guise of a resurgent nationalism? The Director of the McMaster Centre for Research in the Public Interest, Henry Giroux, believes so.
“I have no apologies whatsoever for using the word fascist politics. And I think that people who are afraid to do that become complicit with the very politics they condemn. Because if you can’t learn from history, then it seems to me that you end up in the dark,” (Henry Giroux).[iv]
In this next installment of the Words Create Worlds series, we will turn to the work of two American authors who warn us against a global movement into fascism. Both authors have familial roots in the persecution of the Jewish people during the holocaust and the Soviet take over of Eastern Europe after World War II. We will first discuss former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright’s book, Fascism: A Warning. Then we will turn to Yale professor, Stanley Jordan’s book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. I do not intend this to be polemical, partisan politics, but rather to objectively document the current resurgence of fascistic rhetoric, in the United States and globally, in light of the history of fascism in the 20th Century.
“Our primary public health measure at this time is not getting too physically close to one another. However, we know from research that socialization has a positive effect and isolation a negative effect on our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. What we need right now, for our personal and collective health, is not social distancing, but physical distancing. We need to find ways of being social and connecting without physically touching or being in close physical proximity. We need to find ways of staying connected, inside and out.”
To read the full post, follow the link, thanks CLOSLER for all the great work you are doing on clinician wellness during these times.
After seeking comes finding & receiving, but this gift transforms us in ways we could not imagine. The old falls away in what can be a painful birthing process as we are born into a new state of being – this is the initiation process.
Table of Contents for Part II:
Part II: Initiation (Finding/Receiving)
7 / Story Medicine
8 / Entering the Doorway
9 / Guhā: Cave of the Heart
10 / Enlightenment & Endarkenment
11 / Initiation
0 / Na-yo ti-ay we-ah (We Do Not Exist)
Story Medicine
Transformation is difficult to put into words and that is why stories are so often used to capture that which cannot be explained and yet somehow it can and must be told. We begin the second part of Becoming Medicine by telling various stories from various parts of the world. As Joseph and I write,
“There is a growing field of medicine which is not new, but is rather the rediscovering and remembering of how speaking words and listening to stories can be transformational for the individual and society,” (175).
The stories we tell each other and that we tell ourselves have real effects. Stories are where our imaginations are activated where we can contextualize suffering and learn hope and healing. As Lewis Mehl-Madrona (who incidentally wrote a wonderful foreword to the book) has written,
“I saw that we create our own world . . . if we refuse to believe in healing, healing does not exist. If we sing and dance only of molecules and drugs, then molecules and drugs determine our fate and drugs will be our only hope. What we believe in is what comes true. . . . What we sing and dance is what will be,” (Coyote Medicine, 111).
We can look at the creation stories of the world as metaphorical descriptions of becoming initiated into being fully human.
Joseph Rael walking through Doorway
Entering the Doorway
To get from here to there, we need to find some entrance, some passageway. There are many different paths, but they only appear with seeking. A person can be a doorway, a book can be a doorway, even the solid walls of a solitary cave can become a doorway.
“When I first met Joseph Rael and thought about our writing a book together, the thought came to me: ‘We are doorways for each other.’ It was not a conscious, logical decision, more an instantaneous intuition that holds many levels of meaning. For me, Joseph is a doorway into a deeper spirituality. . . . I am able to bring elements of spirituality into our book that would be difficult to do as a psychiatrist trying to maintain a balance on the edge of medicine and healing,” (194).
When the Knights of the Round Table were setting off in search of the grail
“They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, Where it was darkest and there was no path. Where there’s a way or path, It is someone else’s path; each human being is a unique phenomenon” (Joseph Campbell, in Phil Cousineau, ed., The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on HisLife and Work, viii).
Heart Meditation, David Kopacz, 2014
Guhā: Cave of the Heart
As I was following leads and threads that sometimes disappeared into mist, or sometimes became tangled knots that seemed to lead nowhere, I came across the Sanskrit word, guhā, which can be translated as “the cave of the heart.” I stumbled upon a thread of Christian-Hindu mysticism through the writings of Wayne Teasdale, Bede Griffiths, and Abhishiktananda. All three wrote about the cave of the heart and of finding the Divine within the darkness of one’s own heart. As I thought about the heart, I realized that our physical heart, as all of our inner organs, are immersed in the darkness of the inner body. While we often think of the heart, metaphorically, as a place of light and love, it is physically and literally in the dark. One of the aspects of initiation is being able to see the light within the darkness deep within the heart. The depths of the heart also are the place where our identity shifts from individual to universal, as Wayne Teasdale wrote, “the deepest center of ourselves is one with the deepest center of the universe,” (The Mystic Heart, 53).
Joseph Rael frequently will say, “We are the microcosm of the macrocosm,” and I have always struggled to understand how the personal becomes the universal. In many ways this is the more amazing thing to me. I have come to terms with the fact that there is light in the darkness, but how incredible it is that when we go into our deepest heart center we reach the Divine and a state of non-duality/unity with all things!
In this chapter we look at various holy people who went into the darkness of caves in order to see the light: Abhishiktananda, Ramana Maharshi, Saint Benedict, Saint Francis, and Saint John of the Cross who went into the metaphorical cave of the “dark night of the soul.” In Pueblo tradition, initiates would go into the darkness of the kiva and Joseph had those experiences as he was growing up. There is also the ceremony of the sweat lodge which is done in darkness.
Joseph Rael teaches that the center of the medicine wheel is the heart and that the heart is a “medicine bag” which is an empty, dark pouch, which carries “sacred objects.” With the guhā we add the cave of the heart. Joseph told me about the meaning of the word “cave.”
“Nah au kwee leh neh is the Tiwa word for cave. Nah means ‘self.’ Au kwee – means ‘curved.’ Leh neh means ‘straight like a fence.’ Nah means that when we enter a cave, we are entering into ourselves andwe should think of the cave as our self. We should expect that when we firstenter the cave it will turn every which way and it can get confusing, buteventually it will straighten out and you will then find what you are seeking,” (210).
Heart at the Center of Dark Matter, David Kopacz, 2016
Enlightenment & Endarkenment
In this chapter we look at different traditions relationships to wisdom found in the light and wisdom found in the dark. Perhaps enlightenment is the transformational realization that light is found even in the dark. Joseph is always talking about what he learns about physics and astronomy and how that fits with the traditions he comes from and from his visionary experiences. We also look at dark matter and dark energy in this chapter and draw on the work of physicists like David Bohm and Stephon Alexander. Alexander wrote The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe and this leads to a nice riff on physics, metaphysics and jazz and we blend in a bit about John and Alice Coltrane. From everything I have learned from Joseph and everything I have read, at the core of enlightenment is non-duality, coming into unity with all beings and creation.
Blue Feather, David Kopacz, 2017
Initiation
Initiation represents one of the most significant spiritual phenomena in the history of humanity. It is an act that involves not only the religious life of the individual . . . it involves his entire life. It is through initiation that . . . man becomes what he is and what he should be – a being open to the life of the spirit, hence one who participates in the culture into which he was born,” (Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation, 27).
The entire book, really, is about initiation. In this chapter we look at the role of ceremony in initiation, as a way of connecting two different elements or realities into one wholeness. We review the concept of liminality (the space between two states of being) and liminal beings (those like mystics, visionaries, and shamans who become at home in these in-between states and serve as guides for those being initiated).
As I worked with Joseph, I began to realize that the whole process of writing the book was an initiation.
“Writing this book is part of my initiation with Joseph. Initiation is a new state of being and a new sense of one’s interrelationship and nonduality. Initiation is to realize that each of us is “the light of the Ancient Ones shining forth into the present.” Initiation is entering into a living spirituality where there is no separation between mind and body or between spirit and matter. Initiation is not something you do once and are done with; rather it is an understanding that “we do not exist” and yet we are perpetually coming into being and being reborn every moment.”
Crow Flying through Dark Matter, David Kopacz, 2018
Na-yo ti-ay we-ah (We Do Not Exist)
This is an often repeated saying of Joseph’s. In this chapter I look at it in context with concepts from Buddhism and Hinduism on the nature of reality being maya, illusion. I open the chapter with a discussion with Joseph on the word “zero” and this phrase “we do not exist.” Joseph became energized and did some heartfelt explanation, at some point saying, “There’s something going on here that I’m not even going to try to explain,” (309). While he kept on talking with only a brief pause, I am going to stop with that statement!
Next week I will publish Part III of this overview of Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality.
Check out my new post on CLOSLER, “Returning to the Medicine of the Heart During a Pandemic.” CLOSLER: Moving us Closer to Osler, is a Miller Coulson Clinical Excellence Initiative out of Johns Hopkins and they have published a number of my essays in the past.
Heart Meditation, David Kopacz (2014)
How can we practice the kind of medicine that we so desperately need right now? Perhaps it is time to return to a medicine of the heart and of the soul.
In this post I look at how we can access the ever-renewable resource of hope and inspiration of the heart during these times when our minds our over-loaded with information and worry. I am trying to find something every day and every week that is positive and hopeful and I’ll be sharing these Daily Inspirations and Weekly Affirmations. Here is a Heart Meditation we can use, but really anything that brings us out of our heads and into our heart and our bodies is so necessary during these times: meditation, exercise, play, laughter, the beauty of nature.
A Heart Meditation
There are many different pathways and many different journeys that can lead you back to your heart. Here is a simple one.
Take a deep breath.
Take a deep breath and close your eyes.
Take a deep breath and bring your focus to your heart.
Remember how the heart works: accepting de-oxygenated blood, giving this to the lungs; accepting vitalized, oxygenated blood from the lungs; then giving away this goodness to the rest of the body. Remember that the heart functions by accepting the “worst” (deoxygenated blood) and giving it away; accepting the “best” (oxygenated blood) and giving it away.
Take a deep breath, feeling with your body and imagination how the heart and lungs are constantly doing transformation.
Take a deep breath, shift your focus from your mind to your heart. Take a deep breath, explore the workings of your heart.
Here is the link to “Returning to Medicine of the Heart During a Pandemic” on CLOSLER. Note that the video link is to a different song than the one I referenced by Ben Lee, “We’re All in this Together.” You can find that video here, along with a lot of other great songs by Ben Lee – who just came through Seattle and played a great show at the Sunset Lounge in Ballard.
“If we go back to Greek mythology, we will be able to see the creativity of chaos and then be able to reintegrate it into our lives. Chaos was here before anything else, a kind of floating and undifferentiated magma filled with suspended energy. . . .
By perceiving chaos as energy, we reduce both the fear we have of chaotic states and our desire to suppress our strategies to avoid them.
Periods of chaos are marvelously creative.
They are the end of a deceptively organised universe and bring the emergence of a new force. If we dare not to run away from chaos, and not to close our eyes, we will get the impression of floating amidst an ocean of a quivering energy. The body absorbs this energy, the spirit is nourished by it and goes through a phase of withdrawal and restful emptiness out of which the seeds of creativity germinate. It is the end of one order and the beginning of a revitalisation. . . .
Accepting chaos, floating on it as on a benevolent ocean, is a joyous state from which fear has been vanquished. By ceasing our desire to control everything we will feel stimulated, encouraged to desire things to emerge. Control emerges out of the fear of feeling fully alive. There is no authentic joy without encountering chaos.”
How can we transform suffering, fragmentation, and painful inner & outer separation? This is the central question that Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) and I address in our new book, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality. Suffering is the flip side of initiation and enlightenment. If you are seeking to become enlightened, the door that you often enter through is some form of suffering, separation, and fragmentation.
Initiation is the process of becoming more fully human. It is a common process in indigenous societies and in religious traditions. Anthropologists, such as Victor Turner studied initiation, as well as scholars of world religions, for instance, Mircea Eliade. Joseph Campbell popularized the process of initiation as the Hero’s Journey, comprising three primary stages of separation, initiation, and return. Campbell sought to find a way that we “modern” people, who lack religious and sociocultural ritual frameworks for initiation, could transform suffering into personal and spiritual growth. Psychologists and psychiatrists became interested in the concept, as it applies to the presenting common concerns of those seeking psychotherapy. Carl Jung saw the need for initiation and transformation, as he wrote about throughout his career in books such as Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and his posthumous journal, The Red Book.
We live in a disorienting time and we seek to get our bearings again. In our first book together, Joseph Rael and I wrote about his practices of using the medicine wheel as a kind of compass for inner and outer orientation. When we find ourselves disoriented, we need some organizing framework to help us re-orient. The outer directions are North, South, East, and West. There are also the inner directions of spirit, emotion, mind, and body. Joseph also teaches that the center of the medicine wheel is the heart and embodies the principle of carrying. When we enter into the center of the medicine wheel, we realize that our hearts are medicine bags and they are filled with sacred objects. The initiation is the process of “finding the held-back place of goodness,” as Joseph called it in our book, Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD. Initiation is when we go into the center of the medicine wheel to find our medicine, which we come to realize is an ongoing process of becoming medicine – becoming the very thing that we so desperately need.
David Kopacz’s adaptation of Joseph Rael’s Medicine Wheel
We structure the book around the framework of initiation that Joseph Campbell, Victor Turner, Mircea Eliade, and others have described: separation, initiation, return. However, Joseph Rael comes from what he calls a verb language tradition – a language that is full of verbs like breathing, transforming, and becoming. It is a language of connecting, rather than how he describes noun language (English and German, for example) as languages that separate our living and interconnecting world into separate and discrete: people, places, and things. (The process of turning people into things is the topic of dehumanization that I explored in my first book, Re-humanizing Medicine: A Holistic Framework for Transforming Your Self, Your Practice, and the Culture of Medicine). Given Joseph’s predilection for verb language, we adapted separation, initiation, return into: seeking, finding/receiving, and giving. What one seeks with and within one’s heart, one eventually finds and receives, becoming healing medicine, and then as one is fulfilled with this, one overflows with fullness, giving to others what it was that we were seeking. In part III we examine how the personal medicine is also the universal medicine. The medicine that we become is the medicine that the world needs, and we find it through the journey of initiation into our hearts.
We live in a disorienting time and yet maybe instead of trying to go back to the way things were, we can go deeper into transformation, into the way things might be. The idea of initiation is consistent with Jack Mezirow’s model of transformative learning – that one enters into transformation through first becoming disoriented. And we have plenty of disorientation that we find ourselves in the midst of at this present time. Mezirow studied ten stages of transformation and we can break these down into three stages that parallel the stages of separation, initiation, and return. One way to understand transformation is that it is a change of who you are. This can be contrasted with simple change – where you remain the same, but you just change something you do. One can change without being transformed, but transformation is the ultimate change. Disorientation is the first step, according to Mezirow, for transformation. In that sense, maybe we are exactly where we need to be and things are exactly as they should be in order for us, as individuals and collectively, transform.
Adapted from Mezirow, Jack. “Transformational Learning Theory,” in Jack Mezirow, Edward Taylor, and Associates eds., Transformative Learning in Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.
Here is the table of contents of Part I of Becoming Medicine:
Part I: Separation (Seeking) 1 / Becoming Medicine 2 / Circle Medicine 3 / Separation 4 / Becoming a Visionary 5 / Becoming a Shaman 6 / Becoming a Mystic
After studying the various forms of separation/seeking, we look at how ancient and modern people have gone through the process of initiation of becoming visionaries, mystics, and shamans. We define visionaries, shamans, and mystics broadly, with the understanding that anyone can develop these human capacities. We examine my experiences learning from Joseph, as well as Joseph’s life experiences. We review a number of different spiritual teachers, musicians, and healers and their processes of initiation and becoming, including Carl Jung, Henry Corbin, Hildegard of Bingen, Miles Davis, Ben Lee, Evelyn Underhill, Dorothee Soelle, Juan Mascaró, Krishnamurti, and Matthew Fox.
In the next blog post, I will give a brief overview of Part II: Initiation (Finding/Receiving).
Being Fully Human 