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.
This is a talk that I prepared for Seattle University’s 13th Annual Giving Voice to Experience Conference, “Maintaining a Soulful Approach to Psychological Research and Practice: Swimming Upstream in a Technological Society.” It was to have been on 3/7/20, but it was cancelled as Washington state began shutting down due to the COVID-19 Coronavirus. I thought that I could at least get it out there through my blog. The conference will likely be rescheduled in the future, but until then, I’ll release these slides out into the world. We need to come up with creative ways of sharing information and creating community in these times when we cannot gather together. As my friend Suzanne Richman recently said, “Technology is the new architecture of how people gather.” She says the idea is not her’s, she was paraphrasing a talk by a Rabbi she heard on Martin Buber.
“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).
I just received five boxes of books! It is so exciting to see Becoming Medicine in finally in print. Two editions, one color (the Art Medicine Edition) and one in black & white! I keep flipping through the two editions, side by side and comparing how the artwork looks! I’m too excited to read it and I already know what it says, anyway…
It is available directly through Itasca Books (the same price as on Amazon). I ordered a copy through Amazon, myself, and anticipated delivery date is 3/31/20 – 5/30/20, for some reason, although it says it is in stock. At this point I’d recommend getting it directly through Itasca as I know someone has already received it that way. It is also available on Barnes & Noble, but I am just seeing the more expensive Art Medicine Edition there at this point.
The foreword is by Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, PhD and a number of people have written some lovely endorsements that I’ll include in this post:
Becoming Medicine is a great compilation of contemporary medical science and ancient spiritual wisdom. This book is written from the heart like a prayer, if you are a seeker of a living spirituality and want to magnify your power to heal, read this book. — CARL HAMMERSCHLAG, M.D., author of The Dancing Healers, The Theft of the Spirit, and Healing Ceremonies.
This is a remarkable and deeply engaging account in which a Native American shaman and his psychiatrist apprentice plunge deep into the heart centre of a living wisdom. Replete with questor myths and mystical adventures, this passionate, richly cross-referenced and spiritually inclusive book becomes a vibrant junction of intersecting journeys from diverse wisdom traditions. Circling age-old themes of separation, quest and spiritual homecoming, it is an invitation to trust the non-linear journey of inner transformation — one that turns us, eventually, into our own medicine. Marked by an authenticity that readers will instantly recognize, here is a genuine watering-hole at which seekers of all persuasions can pause and ‘drink the light’. — ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM, M.A., author of When God is a Traveller, Sadhguru: More Than A Life, and with Sadhguru, Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga, editor of Eating God: A book of Bhakti Poetry.
Behind the words and images of Becoming Medicine is the wisdom of a man fearless enough to break down all the barriers between what he knows and what he is. Joseph Rael is a unique island of beauty and sanity in our crazy, uncultured culture. And that island that he is, is vaster than the whole world. — PETER KINGSLEY, Ph.D., author of Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity, A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World, and In the Dark Places of Wisdom.
In this wonderful book, Picuris/Ute medicine man Joseph Rael reveals that each of us is an embodied human being who is in fact a medicine bag, a container in which we carry sacredness. By walking into the center of ourselves, into the center of our hearts, we cease to be ourselves and are instead becoming medicine. It is something that is done every moment. Becoming Medicine means that we are becoming capable of being a place for the Breath-Matter-Movement of the vast spirit to manifest and reside for a moment. This is a fabulous book for our times. — HANK WESSELMAN Ph.D., anthropologist and author of nine books on shamanism including The Re-Enchantment: A Shamanic Path to a Life of Wonder, The Bowl of Light: Ancestral Wisdom from a Hawaiian Shaman, the award winning Awakening to the Spirit World (with Sandra Ingerman) and the Spiritwalker trilogy.
Tragically the odious divisive social diseases of the 1930s are returning. Nationalistic, racist and fundamentalist movements are rapidly dividing communities. Innocent people feel more and more lost, alienated, powerless, lonely. They yearn for healing. But how can this healing begin? This is why Becoming Medicine by David Kopacz and Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) is so timely. It is a truly remarkable book, so relevant, so grounded in experience. The medicine of healing begins within each one of us. There we discover our true selves, our unified oneness with all humankind and the universe itself. This is not a healing that is confined to one event. On the contrary, it is a call to a transformative, ongoing, lifelong initiation of discovery. Each discovery leads to a deeper personal and social healing. — GERALD A. ARBUCKLE, Ph.D., Refounding and Pastoral Development Unit, Sydney, Australia. Author of Fundamentalism at Home and Abroad: Analysis and Pastoral Responses (2017), Loneliness: Insights for Healing in a Fragmented World (2018), and Humanizing Healthcare Reforms (2012).
Like the wondrous journeys of the spirit it describes, this book escorts the reader along a path to new understanding and, ultimately, transformation. Along the way, we are reminded of our true nature, our kinship with everything around us, and our power to navigate through our own tumultuous times. The path can be bumpy. It can be circular. Sometimes it is dark. This book helps light the way, and every page is a step toward something meaningful. Where will your journey take you? — J. ADAM RINDFLEISCH, M.Phil., M.D., Medical Director, Integrative Health, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Associate Professor, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health.
Becoming Medicine will help you think in circles, dream-journey in technicolor, speak your vowels with mystic awareness, listen to music with more heart, and feel your heartbeat with more awe. The wonderful paintings of Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) and David Kopacz are a generous offering to linger over. I am grateful for their creative friendship and commitment to share a depth of spiritual, psychological, quantum physics, and visionary teachings. Becoming Medicine is a call to community, not only so that we seek out companions to slowly explore the insights and stories in this book. But so that we each take an inner journey into our hearts and return as the visionary healers the community of earth is calling for. — SHELLY L. FRANCIS, author of The Courage Way: Leading and Living With Integrity (2018).
This is a book that can really change your life. David Kopacz and Joseph Rael’s Becoming Medicine is a remarkable collaboration between two brilliant and courageous pioneers. The information they provide opens a doorway to a healing path that unveils the hidden potential of the human spirit. Blending together knowledge that is ancient and sacred within the backdrop of modern day psychiatry, it is deeply illuminating. It is a must read for anyone interested in embarking on a journey of transformation and becoming medicine for the world. — SHILAGH MIRGAIN, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Distinguished Psychologist, University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Becoming Medicine byDavid R. Kopacz, & Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) is a powerful illustration of the title through the authors’ sharing of their own stories, beautiful art and text, using examples from scientific and humanistic/spiritual literature. Its message is not about becoming a doctor or a healer, but the path to becoming the medicine itself. This is a profound exploration of the journey to Become More — Medicine to self, others and the world, integrating personal examples with multiple cultural traditions present and past. In Becoming Medicine, Kopacz and Rael detail not only the journey for individuals but a path for a disoriented and fragmented world to engage in transformation towards wholeness and unity. Health workers and all seekers alike will benefit from this work.— MICHAEL HOLLIFIELD, M.D., (Long Beach, California & Angel Fire, New Mexico), President and CEO, War Survivors Institute, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
Becoming Medicine is a bridge between many dualities including: the conscious and the unconscious, the scientific and the spiritual, the ordinary and the non-ordinary, and the Western and the Indigenous. Intricately referenced and yet personal in narrative, David and Joseph weave us through distinct world traditions to reveal the interconnectedness in stories of healing. This bridge is likely to most benefit those of us educated in western contexts, where our minds have been trained to neglect the wisdom of circles and spirit. Whether readers begin as healers or seekers, they will realize the congruence of these paths. Becoming Medicine inspires us into our own shamanic journeys. — NEETA RAMKUMAR, Ph.D., Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, University of the South Pacific, Fiji.
Dr. Kopacz holds the space between the mystery and majesty of shamanic tradition and the study of anthropology and medicine. His writing brings the reader into sublime experiences that Dr. Kopacz holds in his body. He walks the walk between the seen and the unseen, transforming life along the way. Prepare to be fascinated. Prepare to be amazed. You’ll return over and over to the information on the pages and between them. — HENRI ROCA, M.D., Functional Medicine Specialist, Shamanic Journeyer, Clinical Assistant professor, family and community health, Louisiana State University School of Medicine, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
The 2019 Power of Words conference was a small, intimate group of around 60 people. I found the discussions with fascinating and interesting people outside of the conference as inspiring as the actual conference offerings – which were incredible! I was able to have a nice chat with Caryn and we exchanged books, and I now have her Landed and Following the Curve to continue the conference with now that I am home. I met the new managing director, Hanne Weedon. Actually, I ended up chatting with most of the council at some point during the conference: Liz Burke-Cravens, Caleb Winebrenner, and Chip Cummings.
Right from the start of the conference, I sat down to dinner with author Gregg Levoy (Callings, Vital Signs) and Pediatric Neurologist, Peter Bingham (whose book in progress idea sounds great and I hope to read some day). Gregg Levoy did a few presentations, starting with his pre-conference workshop, Courage & Clarity with Your Right Calling – a great session in which he asked the audience a series of questions leading deeper into passion and calling and then looking through our answers to “search for concentrations of energy” in our answers and common themes. He also gave the keynote that night. Gregg was gracious enough to attend my workshop Heroic & Healing Journeys for Contemporary Times (which I’ll discuss in a future post), and he referenced Camus’ The Rebel, that “to be human is to rebel against tyranny.” It is quite a synchronicity that I had brought along that very book with me to the conference!
Gregg Levoy
The first pre-conference workshop I attended was Noa Baum’s “Stories Old & New: A Path to Healing & Resilience,” a storytelling workshop. This was a very helpful workshop and made me think about how “transformation is contagious,” to tell a personal story of transformation can become a universal story of transformation, and vice versa. Noa also gave a spell-binding performance of her “A Land Twice Promised.” I was speechless for a while after it. Noa is a Jewish woman from Israel and it is the story of her years of friendship with a Palestinian mother, recalling the struggles of growing up in the Middle East, whilst their children played together in the United States. The performance follows the story of their friendship, as well as the stories of their mothers. The name of her performance is the same title as her book, A Land Twice Promised: An Israeli Woman’s Quest for Peace. In speaking of the distinction between the performance and the book, Noa told me, “the show is the story of our friendship and the stories of our mothers. The book is a bit different – it is a memoir telling the story behind the show and how it all came to be. It is also the story of how I discovered the transformative healing power of storytelling and how I use it for peacebuilding.”
Noa Baum
The third pre-conference workshop was given by the wonderful poet, Usha Akella, “Fetch the Fire: Writing the Ghazal.” This was a great history and introduction to the form of the ghazal and we all muddled through writing one ourselves. The generous poet, Steffen Horstmann had donated signed copies of his book, Jalsaghar – thanks for this Steffen! We studied his ghazal, “[Clouds roil as Shango drum echoes in the Nile delta],” with the great line: “Charms rattle in a shaman’s fist as wind along the shore / Thrashes trees (rousing panthers from shadows) in the Nile delta.” Usha’s keynote the next day, “Matwaala: The Birth of a Festival,” described how she worked to found Matwaala, the South Asian Diaspora Poets Collective. This was a riveting presentation that focused not only on poetry, but politics, spirituality, immigration, and on bringing all voices together. It concluded with Usha reading her own poem, “Enough!” which Usha told the TLA Network they could share. This poem is a call and a challenge for “the people” to take care of the children of this Earth. Usha’s newest book of poetry is entitled, The Waiting. The book starts with the Prologue: “The hidden hand gently opens, reveals / the secret script so concealed from us, / And as the hope-less night moves to morning, / The heart’s compass from distrust to trust.”The Waiting is published in India, but you can get a copy directly from Usha by emailing her at: Reachmatwaala@gmail.com. Her other books are worth looking for: A Face That Does Not Bear the Footprints of the World, …Kali Dances. So Do I…, Ek: An English Musical on the Life of Shirdi Sai Baba, and her travel journal and poems, The Rosary of Latitudes. You can find links to Usha Akella’s poems through the Matwaala website and also a few of her poems from The Waiting are available on the Muse Indian website.
Usha Akella
I thoroughly enjoyed several long talks with Peter Bingham of Vermont Children’s Hospital and Suzanne Richmond, who developed the Health Arts & Sciences program at Goddard College. Suzanne introduced me to Dr. Celia Hildebrand, an acupuncturist, who then invited me to drive out to meet Gladys Taylor McGarey, one of the founders of the American Holistic Medical Association. I had a nice chat with Celia and Gladys and we all spoke of our callings and journeys into becoming healers. Gladys is quite impressive, at 98 years old she is still working on developing a Living Medicine program in the community and she shared with us some of her notes for her upcoming talk at the Academy of Integrative Health & Medicine conference later this month.
Dr. Gladys McGarey
The conference was set at the beautiful Franciscan Renewal Center with a desert healing garden that I started every morning in, drinking coffee, journaling, and watching and listening to all the desert birds and animals waking up for the day.
Such great community, inspiring company, and visionary creativity at the Transformative Language Arts Network Power of Words Conference! Check out their website and their work! Photos below of (Middle Right) David Kopacz, Usha Akella, and Chip Cummings and (Lower Left) Peter Bingham, David Kopacz, poet Cindy Rinne, Suzanne Richmond, and Usha Akella.
Being Fully Human 