False Faces

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Deborah

We gather in the teepee yet again, this time to honor our ancestors and ask to feed and be fed by the living legacy of this northwest coastal region. We will call to the spirits to animate our masks and to help us embody the beings whose stories need to be told. Already dressed in our costumes , we prepare to put on our masks.

But wait – this makes no sense. We’re putting on masks to expand our experience of our selves… How can that be?

Don’t masks hide our true identity? Don’t I, don’t we wear masks every day?

My Mother taught me to put my best foot forward, whatever that means. When I was young, she suggested I bleach my hair to make me more attractive,  wear rouge and mascara to make myself pretty, as if my DNA hadn’t made me pretty enough, match my sweater to my skirt and wear matching socks. And though I fought it, I also complied to the best of my ability, whatever that means.

What are these false faces that we wear everyday?

An attempt to keep the world engaged with me, that’s what my mask is. Pimples and smells, creamy colored teeth instead of snow white, any deformity at all and even simply being plain don’t cut the mustard.  Habits of personality have frozen our faces into certain configurations. We are all petrified versions of our natural spontaneous and warm hearted selves. Luckily,  my sagging face has lots of laugh lines but for many, disdain, anger, fear and depression have left unappealing tracks.

I never even knew I wore a mask  –   until it fell off.

In 1982, I was co-facilitating a therapy group for men and women with my colleague, a male psychiatrist. One particular night I was feeling quite sassy and was zinging with helpful insights. I flung one to a woman in the group who zinged right back with:

Who the hell do you think you are?

Lightning flashed!

I had not a clue.

Like mosaic shards crumbling off an old stone wall, my face shattered on the ground at my feet. There was a replica underneath that sort of looked like my old face but with more vulnerability, more realness. I burst into tears of shock. For hours I cried. Each heaving breath brought a sense of new possibilities and I became aware that I was undergoing an unbidden, uncontrollable deep cleansing of old cultural and familial habits of thinking about myself. A blessing!

So the mask of propriety and perfection is one kind of mask many of us have been taught to wear in our modern, urban world. There are myriad variations – pretending to be fine when we’re not, of being nice when we’re not feeling very generous or kind, of looking 25 when we’re 55, of saying what we think wants to be heard not what we really want to say, all false faces that dishonor our souls, hide our authenticity.

Then there masks worn by both hero and villain. Robbers, rapists, the lone ranger and superman all hide their identities behind the mask.

But today, the masks we are about to put on our faces  reveal our deeper/wider selves. Masks crafted with the help of invisible energies and expansive ideas, masks which stretch our limits and enlarge our sense of self… revealing aspects of ourselves that we didn’t know belonged to us. These masks allow us to be more fully who we are and in service of something larger than our short lived selves.

It is these masks which we don now.

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There’s a Story Waiting

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Deborah

We return to the teepee for three more posture experiences in the next twenty-four hours. I’ll describe two of them in this post.

We encounter our mythic selves more deeply by experiencing the birthing posture. One of my favorites, this particular pose is found all over the world, from Bolivia, to “the Near East, where they date from about 7000 years ago, to modern examples in central and western Africa, New Zealand and throughout Polynesia.” The birthing figure shown below comes from Rurutu and “shows the god Tangaroa …apparently giving birth to other gods and humans who are shown as small figures carved in a variety of ritual postures all over his body.” ( p. 213-14, Gore, Ecstatic Body Postures.) I can identify many of these poses as ones we call ecstatic postures: empowerment, chiltan spirits, bear, singing shaman, realm of the dead. This fact acknowledges the importance of these particular physical poses to our ancestors, though we can only imagine why.

 

The following day, we ask Tennessee Diviner to help with the task of designing our ritual. Divining postures in general reveal that which is hidden. “ … (P)eople tend to receive answers both in images and words. It is not unusual for someone to hear a distinct message, such as, ‘seeing is not seeing, feeling is seeing.’ Perhaps that is one reason people respond so strongly to the Lady of Cholula and the Tennessee Diviner as very real beings; they speak to people in words, and they have identifiable personality styles.” ( p.101, Gore. )

Not an easy pose for most of us to hold, Tennessee Diviner reliably outlines detailed rituals. I have no explanation for why this is so, but over the last thirty years, many groups in many places affirm the capacity of this pose to help us create potent and unique rituals related specifically to the sacred work at hand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a sampling of what Tennessee Diviner shared with us:

Music:

two original songs with words and melodies.
one remembered song from long ago.
a simple series of notes which at least four of us heard:
F, C-, C. These notes were suddenly recognized as the melody in one of the songs mentioned above.

             Movement:

enfolding and unfolding seemed to be a repetitive                                      theme:

undulating back and forth with the feet as well as side to side
slow arm movements rising and falling, up and down.

Spaces:

the teepee

the medicine wheel which was revealed to have a fault line running through it.

the forest as mystery

the lodge as the womb of darkness, the void

the forest as reflected brilliance

the meadow as the coeur of the sun

Storylines:

                        There’s a story waiting to be told and no one to tell it.

The story starts here.

Warriors in all cultures are reaching for freedom.

The sun has to be convinced to shine.

The sun is the heart is the core of it all.

There’s a vertical axis with soaring views and earthen hues.

There are all seeing eyes everywhere.

 

Process:         

                        D gifted us with a clear, almost step by step, progression of where to begin and how, where to go next, and then next, including specific details like needing to circle with our backs to a cedar tree looking out,  sharing our love for the world outward, and needing to collaborate  to entice the sun from hiding.

A final note for today: Choosing to co-create with spirit demands trust and so we grow in freedom and delight. Each person receives only a portion of what the group needs to know.  By asking our egos to trust not-knowing and to depend on each other, we liberate ourselves to join with the living moment, giving and receiving, leading and following, honoring natural rhythms and communal resilience.

ahhhhh yes, a new cultural story begins and we’re sharing it here now.

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Mythic Beings Arrive

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Deborah

Returning to our process under the bower, we start sharing the stories of our encounters in non-ordinary reality. Quickly, we realize that we are truly setting out on an unknown journey – our ceremony will be peopled by mythic beings. I hesitate to use that word, peopled…it’s just sooooo two-legged, meaning human in this instance.

Maybe inhabited would be better.

No.

Most trance dances of this kind are populated. . .mmmm…according to the dictionary, populated usually references humans and sometimes data.

Our mythic beings are neither …

In most ceremonies of this kind, humans experience the world from the perspective of another familiar life form – be it salmon, river, ant, kangaroo or meadow. This time we are not encountering an ordinary extra-ordinary other. Instead of meeting a bear, there is a bear butterfly which morphs into a rainbow bird.

There’s no ordinary fox but a mythic fox/mouse/mole/rat being who tunnels underground and is comfortable seeing – or not – in the dark.

Not an ordinary crow but a hawk/eagle/raven/condor who quickly morphs into a bird of prey, a bird of pray, a bird of play. Play, prey, pray becomes caw, caw, caw, caw, caw. But when the costume is finished, this being is all of that AND an uncommon warrior.

S first sees a gossamer dragon fish, but becomes a dancing deer. She’s startled when a day later someone notices she’s wearing a tee shirt which carries the image of the dancing deer shaman from LascauxCave. All along she’s related to that mythical creature without being aware of it.

Then there’s the sun. Three of us bring back the sun in different forms:

D as a yellow/golden/orange/red shimmering light filled dragon bird being who champions our freedom.

C as a sun with both light and dark aspects. Two of us know the Japanese myth about the Sun Goddess Amaterasu and recognize that C has brought its themes through to us without conscious knowledge. That connection with ancient lore gives greater significance to the storylines that come through us a day later. Indigo and yellow/orange dominate.

V as solar dieties from many traditions, including Egyptian, Tibetan and South American. She carries the energy of Amun-Ra, considered both light and dark, masculine and feminine, revealed divinity and champion of the poor. This sun speaks for the voiceless.

I’ve already mentioned in the prior post that I am to dance for the drum, for the ecosystem, but as I work on my mask, I become the entire planet.

I hope the images give you an idea of the creativity that comes forth as we develop our expanded sense of self. Generosity of spirit abounds. Materials are shared, we help each other, mistakes become new directions, questions are asked and answers pour forth in myriad ways. We collaborate in the kitchen and bring each other snacks in perfect timing with growling bellies.

Sometimes the other beings around us join the gaialogue and give an exclamation point to something that’s been said. An unseen hawk keening at the precise moment of a human’s insight is always a good marker of significance! A horse whinnying, the wind picking up for just a few seconds, a bee buzzing past one’s ear, a leaf falling in your lap at the precise moment you were talking about letting go…we notice all that and choose to give it import.

If you haven’t recently experienced the responsiveness of the world around us, you may have forgotten what good medicine it is for our urban loneliness.

The living myth emerges next time.

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The Woman at the Gate

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Deborah

V, whose bower this is in a manner of speaking, rubs the trance from her eyes. Rising to her feet and shrugging her shoulders, she says, “I need to go to her. I bet it’s our neighbor. She’s deeply religious.” To the driveway’s gate, V walks swiftly, though with a bit of a wobble so abrupt has been her return to the mundane matters of fear.

The rest of us grumble a bit and wonder what our outdoor drumming has stirred up in the neighborhood. Settling down, we snack, share water bottles and begin recording our experiences before every dayness sweeps them down the river of forgetfulness.

I reflect on my own fear of drumming forty years earlier. Then married and with four children between the ages of 2 and 9, we’d recently moved into the long awaited home we’d had built in the country – twenty three acres bordering on sixty more at least – meadows, forest, stream and no neighbors. One evening along about dusk as we were putting the kids to bed, drumming, not a lone person but a group drumming, began just out of sight of our home. I’d never heard drumming before but it conjured primitive lust and violence to me. By the light of the next morning, I could imagine it was simply young folk drumming for the full moon, but at night with the horror of Charles Manson still in the news, my atavistic fears of the unknown rose to Matterhorn heights. I panicked.

This was after all thePhiladelphia suburbs and I was after all an upstanding  educated young woman who’d never encountered such a thing as people beating sticks on wood and leather. Why would anyone want to do that? I had no generosity of spirit toward things remotely occult or people possibly tainted by witchery. I was a champion of the underdog but not that underdog. I fought for social justice and acceptance of the other – but not THAT other.

My compassion for the woman at the gate bubbles freely, contrary to some of my mates who are angry, aghast that we are disturbed and disrupted this way.

After only a few minutes, V comes back and reports that it indeed was their neighbor and she finds the drumming annoying and distasteful. V points out that power lawn mowers are operating all over the neighborhood and that they, too, are loud and annoying. “But they last only a short time. You were drumming last night, too!” V reassures her that this is a weekend event and that we’d be drumming only a few more times. Saturday evening would be the last of it. She smiles, lowers her shoulders.  “Oh that’s not so bad, “ she says.

We realize that this is a powerful experience, a microcosm of planetary conflicts as cultural paradigms collide. This is a our personal opportunity as a group to handle the situation with dignity, courage and compassion, a call to stay true to our course at the same time we honor the doubts and misperceptions of the other, doing our utmost to keep our own bellies relaxed and our own hearts open.

Whoa, this is the world’s work!

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The Following Day

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Deborah

Morning dawns with summer perfection. We decide to hold our next posture outdoors to connect more deeply with the sensory delight of our earthly home.

A bower beckons.

The dictionary tells me that a bower means both “a pleasant shady place under trees or climbing plants” and “each of two anchors carried at a ship’s bow.” The latter evokes my felt sense of being tethered, anchored, to the core of the planet whenever I lie belly down on the earth in this particular pose.

Lying on blankets, we stretch out on our stomachs in two rows with our heads toward each other’s. We cross our ankles and rest our hands, palms down, just above our heads which are turned to the right side. To replicate the drawing as closely as possible, we place our hand drums on our upper backs. My drumming will resonate with these drums like tuning forks, deepening our body/mind response and assisting the spirit horse which carries our consciousness into alternate reality. (In Shamanic terms, the drum is often considered to be a horse.)

*image from Gore, Ecstatic Body Postures, p186

This pose, called the Sami Lower World Posture, reliably takes us down into the fecund, mysterious, dark world below the surface of the ground, the world of roots in the global cosmologies of the world tree. Here we may encounter the ancestors as well as allies of various kinds. Our purpose today in traveling here is to meet the spirit being with whom we will collaborate for the remainder of our shared time. We anticipate making costumes and masks for them so that we can more fully embody their essence in us. We want to bring their wisdom through us by dancing their dance, singing their songs, praying their prayers.

We want to animate our “ordinary” lives by reclaiming our relationship to the great mystery and our invisible kin. Felicitas (Felicitas Goodman, PhD, anthropologist and founder of this method.) taught me that the spirits need us to do the work in this world of matter, that the spirit world languishes today because too many humans have neglected it.

That makes common sense to me. Spirit and human need each other.

When everyone is lying down on the warm buzzing earth, I begin to drum. The drum immediately begins singing and even embellishes with the sound of click sticks though no person I see is clicking sticks. Despite no walls to contain the sound, I’m “wombed” in vibrational warmth. Living in two worlds simultaneously, I watch out for each person and hold safe our bower as container. Though I am not officially “trancing”, I see that I am meant to dance for the drum. I am the beater of the drum. Actually, I am the whole ecosystem with trees embedded in sky. I begin to know the rudiments of my disk shaped mask.

I’m aware that clocktime tells me I have two minutes left to drum. I’m loathe to stop so immersed am I in this glorious sound cocoon.

Hallooooooooooo.

I think spirit is calling me. Wow. Awesome. How cool is that? I keep drumming. 90 seconds remain.

Hahhllloooooooooooooooooo.

I flash on Felicitas, my ancestor, calling and encouraging. I flash on Belinda ( Belinda Gore, author of two books on the practice of postures and my mentor. ) standing at the gate to the driveway to our East. She’s come to surprise us since she assisted me at our first trance dance in Montana in 1995.

I think Hello is my spirit world leaping into my ordinary reality. I keep drumming. 60 seconds to go.

Hahhhhhhhhhhhllllllllllll0000000000000000000!

Oooops. Peremptory, whining now…My mates begin to stir. One even sits up rubbing her eyes in abrupt return to earthly awareness.

I stop drumming.

HAHHHHHLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…

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Giving Voice

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Deborah

Holding a posture that looks like this,*

we tilt our heads, open our mouths, close our eyes and sing, “Ahhhhhh,” when the rattle and drum beat begins.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…Ahhhhhhh…Ahh….Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

The drum and rattle hold the center of the belly rich sound cascading round us, seeming to balloon the walls of the teepee. We live in our own vibratory realm for the duration of fifteen minutes of clock time.

Eons flash by with the evolutionary genetic genius of vocalizations coming into form on this planet:

oceans thunder, fires crackle, earth groans, seeds pop, winds shudder, tall grasses murmur, . . .

crabs clatter, birds chitter, buffaloes bellow, horses whinny, boars grunt, bees buzz, dragonflies flit, . . .

the human sounds of feeling arrive – laughing, crying, chortling, screaming, snarling, moaning, a sibilance of sighing, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhing.

All of this sound in one small teepee, one small group, cocoons us in the transitory soup of transformation.

The cacophony ebbs and flows and ebbs again. With our eyes closed and our open mouths tilted toward the sky, seemingly lost in this world of our own vocalizations, the group still seems to know when clock time has almost reached the end. Sound softens, weaves into harmony. The rattle/drum ceases.

Silence

Blessed silence, replete with the contrast.

 

Slowly the group begins to sit down, a water bottle is sipped, snacks are passed, journals open and words take shape on pages. A sense of wonder permeates the teepee. Gently we begin to share:

            I lost myself in the sound. Became one with everyone.

            My voice took flight.

            I’ve never experienced such freedom.

            The chaos scared me a bit, but then our sounds changed. I experienced the rainforest, then heard instruments, even angelic voices.

            I couldn’t distinguish my voice from the others and when I finally did, I was shocked to hear how big the sounds were that were coming out of me.

            I’m speechless at the moment…So much unfolded in such a short time.

            My throat opened up and my mouth moved in ways I never thought possible. I was amazed to witness my tongue take on a life of its own.

            Usually, I’m not comfortable singing at all and yet here right now I sang with abandon. Felt awesome, empowering.

Standing in our voices, giving voice to the “currency” deep within… that’s how we begin living the new story of our lives.

* images from Ecstatic Body Postures – An Alternate Reality Workbook by Belinda Gore, pp 272 and 276.

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The Journey Begins

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Deborah

Dear Reader,

Ten days ago you may remember I began chronicling the journey that eight ordinary people took to birth a living myth for our time. I’ve made a few “text-ural” detours which I hope add dimensionality to your appreciation of what we were doing.

Now we’re back in the teepee.  We’ve smudged, spoken our prayers and focused on our normal breathing for fifty counts as a way to empty ourselves of monkey-mind chatter and to find our bearings with gratitude. We all take the position of the posture we’ve chosen as our trust building gateway into this four day ceremony. Standing with our hands gently curled, we position them about midway on our sternum with the first knuckles of our little fingers touching. We cock our heads back just a little, open our mouths, close our eyes and wait for the rattle/drum to begin.

I say rattle/drum because I hold the sticks of both a rattle and a drum beater in the same hand. I began simultaneously drumming/rattling in 2000 when I read an interview with Gunter Hasffelder, Director of the Institute for Communication and Brain Research in Stuttgart, Germany, conducted by Nana Nauwald, European teacher of Ecstatic Postures and visionary artist, and a long time associate of Felicitas Goodman, PhD,  anthropologist and founder of the practice of Ecstatic Postures.

Nana asks him: Is there a difference between the direction of inner experience and the intensity of trance if one would compare rattle and drum?

Gunter responds: The difference in the effect has to do with the physical: a rattle has less volume than a drum. The volume of the drum reaches different layers of the brain…The rattle produces more overtones and activates certain endorphins in the brain. The drum has deeper layers, mainly the basic chakras, and also the heart chakra. At the basic chakras the kundalini energy gets stimulated and people get more sensitive to the vibrations in the room. The rattle starts at the heart chakra and moves to the head, so with the rattle you stimulate more the intellectual experience. The drum stimulates the earth energy in the body and connects therefore with communication. Drum and rattle are the media to synchronize the vibration for the group. If there is the leadership of drummer or rattler missing, i.e. when you hear a CD, then, you cannot build up the feeling of community so well. Each person in the group falls back on him/herself and doesn’t have a connection to the collective unconscious,…It is important that someone acts in the middle, one who can hold and lead the group energies and group consciousness. Then, all can steer to a common aim…(and you can) deepen your experience.

This information captivated me and I’ve honored it ever since. Postures open specific doorways to non-ordinary reality, so I figured that I would use a drum alone ( or in tandem with another drum ) only for those Postures that typically take us to the lower world, the world of roots feeding the tree of life.. For those that typically take us to the upper world, the world of branches, then I use rattle(s) exclusively, to help us rise, to fly.

But for most postures, the experience seems enhanced when I offer the rhythmic medicine of both instruments simultaneously.

In this instance, when the rattle/drum beat begins, we all start sounding, aaaaaahhhhhhhh, the vowel sound of “a” in the word father. Aaahhh is a universal sound found in most cultures and is often our intuitive verbalization when we recognize the completion of something or we register understanding. Most of us are comfortable making that sound. We make it all the time in everyday conversation. But most of us modern folk, especially women, are not comfortable giving forth big sound.

And big sound will arrive before the posture session is over…

Stay tuned!

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New Thoughts

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Deborah

I’ve described the group, the setting and the process of Ecstatic Postures.

I’ve even written about that which arouses skepticism and often heated argument – the idea that the invisible world surrounds us and is real, mentionned even that the invisible world actually makes the visible world possible.

Some of the sciences support this view, but they too come under fire by those Newtonian devoted.

Using words I wrote before in a post titled Renewing Mystery, March 24, 2011  I describe a film by Werner Herzog ”Encounters at the End of the World”, the end of the world being Antarctica and the rare breed of humans it attracts.

Herzog interviews physicist Dr. Peter Gorham. An engaging man, Gorham tries to explain the magnificence of the sub-atomic world and says that his project hopes to be the first to identify the “most ridiculous particle you can imagine.”  The neutrino. To illustrate the extent of the neutrino’s ridiculousness, he says matter of factly: “ A billion, a trillion just went through my nose as we were talking and they did nothing to me – they pass through all matter all the time with no effect. They almost exist in a separate universe but we know as physicists we can measure them, make predictions. They exist. But we can’t get our hands on them… the speed, the speed of the entire impulse would be in the range of one, one hundred billionth of a second.

“Without neutrinos, the universe wouldn’t exist…no elements, no thing, can exist without them. In the earliest seconds of the big bang, neutrinos were the dominant particle. They actually determine much of the kinetics of the production of everything we know…As a physicist, I understand it mathematically and intellectually but it still hits me in the gut that there is something here surrounding me, almost like a spirit or a god, that I can’t touch but I can make a measurement . . . it’s like measuring the spirit world or something”. . .

Now doesn’t that give you pause?

To imagine particles so small our technology still can’t show them to us, so fast that they move in billionths of a second, yet they are the foundation of our universe. That they make a physicist use the words: like measuring the spirit world or something.”

It’s interviews like these, between two rational, articulate men, which encourage me to share the ritual Ecstatic Wisdom Posture experience with you.

The Mayan calendar, ancient prophecies, our own burgeoning restlessness about missing something in our urban, comfortable lives, our own curiosity about how we’re going to find our way through these turbulent times, all these things suggest to me that it’s time to recognize new possibilities.

The “real” world of matter is more than it seems.

That’s it in a nutshell. I keep wondering why it’s so hard for us to embrace that possibility, to engage with the notion that humility is potent medicine for what ails us, to acknowledge we are beholden to energies greater than ourselves in this endeavor called living.

For ages and ages, we humans considered the world flat. We knew dragons populated the edges. We never thought humans would visit the bottom of our oceans nor fly to the moon. We thought computers would never be smaller than ten foot square rooms and no one would ever have one of those in her home. We thought phones wired to the wall were miracles, that silent movies were the ultimate and that black and white television was amazing.

We’ve changed our thinking a million times. We simply need to do it again.

Ecstatic Wisdom Postures can help…

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Remembering the Reality of the Invisible

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Deborah

I’m not sure how long anthropologists and historians consider humans “modern.” They probably disagree. Given the quality of ancient artwork found inEurope, I think we are more like our ancestors of 35 to 40,000 years ago than we want to admit.

I’m going out on a limb here: for most of our “modern” human history, we lived in community.  The members of our communities were everything everywhere. It was normal and natural, an everyday occurrence, to communicate with spirit(s)…spirits of the land, the ancestors, the elemental forces that influence our daily commerce like hurricanes and fires, the bears, trees, frogs, rocks, ravens, kangaroos, salmon, clouds, hedgehogs, spiders, mycelia, rivers and slugs – all the beings with whom we share habitat, including the energetic creatures.

We never felt truly isolated, nor separate, because we lived embedded in our habitat.

Can you imagine that?

We began forgetting that interconnectedness and the realities of the invisible about the same time we entered the agricultural age.

Now, though we are all still indigenous really, we urban folk mostly forget we belong to this eairth.

Per Espen Stoknes, in the essay mentioned a post or so ago, says: Is not the air, quite simply, this invisible presence that makes all earthly presence possible, this invisibility that makes all visibility possible? The air hosts and facilitates all earthly relations…The Air is…an original Being just as Gaia is. Maybe we need to coin a new phrase for this. Let’s call it the Eairth – the closely intertwined links between earth and sky, ground and world, ocean and clouds, rain and water vapor. The Eairth, then, is this living, creative world that we are fully inside…

About a year ago, my friend Jeff and I were riding the nighttime ferry, the after dark kind of nighttime ferry. Sitting on comfy chairs behind huge protective windows, we rocked on the waves as we watched the bow slice through heavy fog which parted and swirled around us. We had been talking animatedly about the Ecstatic Wisdom Posture experience we’d just shared with his professional colleagues and other faculty from a university. Suddenly, we fell silent. We looked at each other and simultaneously whispered, “Are you feeling it?” Chills raced up and down my arms. His, too. . . We hushed…

“They’re here, aren’t they?”

The ancestors, all the ancestors that ever were, hovered around us. There is no where else for them to be. Eairth holds them close.

Chief Sealth tried to tell us that more than a hundred years ago.

And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.

CHIEF SEATTLE’S TREATY ORATION 1854 

Source: “Four Wagons West,”
by Roberta Frye Watt, Binsford & Mort, Portland Ore., 1934.
Originally published in the Seattle Sunday Star, Oct. 29 1887.

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The Posture Itself

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Deborah

So here we are, nervously and eagerly, anticipating what will happen next. We know the rhythm drives our nervous system and the specific posture we hold reliably opens the door to a specific neighborhood of what we call Alternate Reality. It’s hard to believe that a mere fifteen minutes can make a big difference in our lives. But wonder of wonders, stuff happens, often big stuff! …maybe even a sense of ecstatic communion with something larger than ourselves. In those mere fifteen minutes our brain waves reliably alter and this has been validated by research.  We also release endorphins for that signature feeling of well-being, blood pressure changes, energy rises and on and on our bodies naturally respond. We often emerge renewed, with eyes sparkling, cheeks glowing with awe, body energized and mind inspired.

All we need to do is witness the process.

And sometimes what we witness is like a movie – images flash across our mind’s eye,  galaxies may be born, evolution zips by and mythic storylines unfold.

Some never SEE but KNOW in ways that are congruent with their personal mind/body system:

Some hear verbal utterances or singing or musical instruments being played.

The more kinesthetic among us may feel meaningful sensations in/on their bodies.

Some detect scents wafting through the space we occupy.

Some only experience the darkness and that has importance, too.

Some shiver, quake and tremble, reminding me of the shaking medicine described by Bradford Keeney and experienced by the Quakers and Shakers in times before it was repressed.

For those of us who envision, it’s easy to acknowledge the truth of Black Elk’s statement, which I humbly paraphrase here: we enter the visionary world that supports the one we typically identify as REAL.

That idea of the invisible being embedded in the visible shouldn’t surprise us. But in our modern, urban world it usually does…

And because this is such an important concept, I’ll delve into it further next time.

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