The Machine Mind versus the Indigenous Soul

I’m thinking about why we need healing ceremonies and this beautifully sad story about my 8-year old son popped to mind.

Tonight we’ll drum some fun up certainly, but then we’ll move deep into ceremonial space, healing space, to extract the stone of pain and then to ask Spirit to sweeten us. (7PM St. Paul Council of Churches).

We are all in a great deal of psychic pain - all kinds of pain, for uncountable reasons. That pain puts our bodies in pain, it wrecks our relationships, our dreams turn from songs to tornadoes.

More and more, my teaching and healing work is about the conversation (some might call it a war, but I don’t) between what I call the Machine Mind and The Indigenous Soul. I could try to blabber about this, or I could point you to Martin Prechtel, who, as a young man, got hit on the head and dragged to the Mayan Jade Water to have his tongue dipped in the power of eloquence:  http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/304/saving_the_indigenous_soul

To me, the difference between the Machine Mind and The Indigenous Soul can be seen most clearly when we ask, “How do I deal with this pain in my mind?” The machine mind answers, “Buy something to dull the pain.” So we buy a pill, a drink or some blinking or shiny thing. And before we know it we are wrapped in debt, stress, and “I have no time.” We teach our children that this is the “real world,” and they better get used to it. And we send them off to become part of the immense factory of the Western mind creating more gizmos to amuse us and then throw away.

To the question “How do I deal with this pain in my mind?’ the Indigenous Soul answers, “Lay on Mother Earth and weep.  Give her your tears, your moans, the sea water of your confused misery. She will take it and cleanse you, as she does everything else.”

Nothing to buy, nothing to believe, no skill, no dogma, no professional religious authority needed.

I want to tell you a sad story. I’m in a divorce. As they go, ours is not so ugly, but it’s full of pain and fear and that potential to be ugly at any moment. It’s heart-twisting, heart-wrenching, and I’m doing my best for my two shining boys to keep it from being heart-breaking.

A couple of weeks ago, my 8-year old, who cries over having to close down the computer game, but has not cried much over the divorce yet – this is a pain too real and deep, so he’s holding it deep down in his muscles – went into deep weeping. It spilled out all night long with moans and gasps and shattered phrases like “But why did she have to leave us? It can’t be forever, it just can’t be. I don’t want ot live in a boy’s house. We need a girl in this house.” On and on.

I held him, and cooed and stroked and whispered “It’s going to be all right” for two hours, and it just would not stop. I became afraid he was going to need to be hospitalized and sedated. That’s the Machine Mind.

I asked him, “Do you want to go outside and lay on the earth with me?” He suddenly stopped crying and said simply, “Okay.”

He wrapped himself in his bedspread. I got a candle and, on the way out the door, I remembered this rattle I had made to sell at my Winter Solstice event. It’s made of fragile reindeer hide, and was the last one of about a dozen and the only one that didn’t sell. Someone had dropped it into a box of stuff as we loaded out of the theatre, and when I found it later, one side was crushed in. It was now useless for making money. I grabbed it and my boy and I trudged out in the dark back yard. It was about 11:30, later than he had ever been up.

We sat in the quiet, cool night. A tiny candle burning, wrapped in his fluffy comforter. I said, ”You know whenever you are upset, you can go to Mother Earth and put your hand on it, or lay down on it, and you can give all those tears and all the sadness to her. She will take them and help you feel better.”

He put his hand on the grass. I asked him to close is eyes and breathe, and as he breathed out, let the sadness and confusion run out like trickling water, down into the earth to feed the grass and the plants. His face became calm and radiant as he breathed his pain out into our now sacred ground of the back yard. I asked him if it helped and he whispered so serenely, “Yes.”

I asked him to look around at the enormous elm tree embracing our yard, and the canopy of Elms and Maples all around us. I said he can also take his tears to these mothers. He is surrounded by mothers. I told him he has a human mother who loves him, and also many other mothers who love him and who will help him and all of us through this. We all hurt, and She can help us all if we ask. I rattled over him and sang a quiet healing song for few moments. His energy had completely transformed.

I gave him the rattle. I told him that now I realized maybe that rattle didn’t sell because it wanted to come to him. It, too, is smashed and wrecked on one side. But it has a soft, beautiful calming sound. I told him that I made it with love, with prayers that whoever owned it would be healed and calmed and strengthen. I told him it had the power of the reindeer in it. I told him how I had found the handle – the leg bone of a deer – in the woods when I was helping someone do a ceremony. I wasn’t looking for bones to make rattle handles, but as our prayers for her moved forward, suddenly I noticed that a few inches from me, these four bones were sticking up from the autumn leaves. At first I didn’t want to take them, but it seemed like they were shouting to me that they wanted to go with me. On the way home I realized they wanted to be rattle handles. I said the power of the Minnesota wild deer is in that rattle – and the power to come back from dying and become something else, something beautiful and useful.

He turned the rattle over and over in his hands. He drew his finger slowly around inside the smashed-in side. “Did you ever notice how the wrecked side is in the shape of a star?” He said. “When I draw a star, I draw it just like this.” He drew his finger in a star shape, over and over in that wound. “The power of the stars is in this rattle too.” He said.

I told him that someday when he is ready we will take that rattle apart and fix that smashed side and put it back together so it’s whole again. I told him I don’t think that will be very long from now, but we will do it when he says it’s time.

He looked up me. “Will you teach me that song someday?”

“Here is a secret between you and me,” I said. “That song was taught to me by a little river in New Mexico, 20 years ago. I was learning from a teacher, and during the work I fell into a great grief. She said to go lay in the little river for as long as it took until the grief had been washed away. I laid in that river for 30 minutes and it was freezing – it was snow melted from the mountains, running down, over me. I nearly turned blue laying there, weeping from regret, sadness, and shame. That river took it away and taught me that song, and it’s the song I’ve used a thousand times to sing over people to help them.

His eyes were as wide as moons. In an astonished voice, he whispered, “You’ve been to New Mexico?”

We went back inside and I think we both slept for 11 hours. I guess that story is about many things, but for right now, it’s about how to move into the Indigenous Mind to help us wrecked beings living in the Machine, how we mend the holes we create in the net of life, or that are created for us.  

May you lay gorgeously on the Mothering Earth.

May your tears shine.

May the holes in your net be mended by Her.

May you be sweetened by Spirit

May you be sweetened by Spirit. 

Shamanic Retreat to Isla Mujeres
February 18-25, 2012

Isla Mujeres (The Women's Island) is a small island about a 20 minute ferry ride into the Caribbean Sea from Cancun Mexico. The north end of the island has all the amenities any northern winter vacationer might want: fabulous gourmet dining, interesting shopping, massages on the beach, flowing rum and tequila, and a tiny bit of nightlife.

The southern part of the island is its own quiet small town. At the southern tip you'll find Punta Sur, which holds a funky sculpture garden and a 300 year old temple to Ixchel, the Mayan goddess of the sea, the moon, the rain, fertility, the jaguar, weaving, and birth – in other words, one Mayan name for the Great Mother. There by her temple, we will sing, rattle, drum and pray in reverence, surrounded on three sides by the sea, crashing majestically from the wild, open Caribbean side, flowing shallow and gentle from the Yucatan side, and blending into a milky way-like swirl of aqua, cerulean and indigo before us to the southern side.

There, as many generations of Mayan and non-Mayan women (and a few non-women) have, we will pray in humility for a healthy birth and rebirth of ourselves and this world. We will make our offerings, pleas, vows and acts of beauty to the great unnamable, unclaimable, untamable creative Spirit that guides us to our authentic powers, to our prophetic mission, and to our active tasks as we walk the land-path north again, back to our lives.

Our retreat makes its home at a Casa de las Palmas, (click for pictures) a gorgeous, private villa with its own pool and access to a secluded beach. The beach will be the center of much ceremonial and shamanic work. The villa is our place of rest, delight, conversation, friendship, and tribal wahoo. Our casa holds a maximum of 15.

Each morning of the retreat I will provide a delightful bit of basic, practical, useful shamanic instruction - something that you can put into practice in your real life to expand your capabilities, leadership, prayer life and connection with Spirit. Each day you are free to explore, lounge in non-snowy delight and vacation in any way that appeals to you.

We will make ceremony together at our private place. We will make ceremony together at Ixchel’s temple. And if you want it, I will design and/or enact training, instruction or specific ceremony for you. For more details, click here to go to my web site.

Becomming Preposterous

January 11, 2008

Dear Drummers,

I love the word preposterous. The words absurd and ridiculous always float through my head, especially in reference to myself. Ridiculous means to cause laughter. Absurd means to be out of tune, or to not be with those who are playing the prescribed chord structure or melody. Both imply moving into a place considered by the rule-setters as uncouth or ill mannered. Both words imply entrance into the non-rational.

But preposterous carries the day. Pre / posterior. To have what is behind come first, or to lead with your ass. I’m reminded of a story someone told me that may or may not be true, which does not really matter, I suppose: Sitting Bull, the great leader, sitting in a very important meeting of elders, gets up, leaves the tipi, comes back ass first with his pants down and parades around the circle, then leaves again, then re-enters again, the dignified leader we love to imagine. Imagine how the world would be different if the Pope or Billy Graham did that or even if there was merely a story floating around that they did.

These words absurd, ridiculous, preposterous float in my head every time I begin my prayers and meditations about what I am called to do in our next drumming gathering. I suspect these words float in your head too, as you enter into your own dreaming, drumming prayers. These are powerful words that feed powerful feelings that, as you move along this (or any) spiritual path, become your companions. When you take on a spiritual path, you invite the feelings of being ridiculous, absurd and preposterous to walk with you the whole way, singing bawdy songs and smacking their lips as they eat, making rude gestures to everyone that you pass by. I’m saying this because I assume that you too are accompanied by similar companions. Good God, I hope you are, or it’s only me, and I don’t want to think about that.

These companions get rowdier for me as Drum Friday approaches. Thankfully, over the years the voices of these companions have led me to another word: Sacred, which at its essence, means to be set apart. All sacred activity takes place in a setting that is set apart from the daily world, in other words, the absurd, the place out of tune with the dominant melody. All sacred work draws a circle around the worshipers – with a wand, a rattle, with words or chants, or with stone architecture like a cathedral – to separate the worshipers from the dominant melody for a time, to take them into a different melodic structure and then return them, refreshed, re-made, renewed, again to the world.

Humans need to go to this other world, this absurd place, this place with a different music, and we need to go there regularly, or we become the opposite of Holy, which means Whole. To be whole, to be in balance with the holy, is to enter into the absurd on a regular basis and to discover its alternative melody, and to walk with these uncouth companions on our way. These companions, these words, are your allies, not your enemies.

Well, this brings me around to what I wanted to say at the very beginning, that if there is one reason for our drumming, it is to re-balance. We go to the other world not to escape this world, and not even to find a more beautiful place to be than this world, but to learn more kinds of music that can change the way we play in this world, change how we play, how we compose our personal melody, and who we play with. We drum so that we may live in more wholeness in this world. Balance and Wholeness will be our theme for Friday.

I’m looking forward making absurd music with you. I leave you with one of my favorite poems form the Hindu-Muslim-mystic poets, the 13th Century Kabir:

Between the conscious and the unconscious,
Between waking and dreaming,
Between this world and the other world,
the mind has put up
a swing:all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway between these two trees,and it never winds down.
Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the wheeling sun and moon;ages go by, and it goes on
Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire,and the secret one slowly growing a body.If you see that for just fifteen seconds, it makes you a servant
for life.
-- Kaibr, India, 1398-1518.[1]

The two paintings posted are by Mark Rothko.

[1] Tr. Robert Bly, The Kabir Book, (Beacon Press 1993)
I have altered the poem in two ways. First, I added the lines “Between waking and dreaming,
Between this world and the other world.” I wanted to open the ideas from being purely psychological. Since I deliver this poem orally, and usually with a drum playing under, I like to establish a swinging feel and these slightly repetitious lines help to do that. Second, I altered the last line from “Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, and it made him a servant for life.” I think Kabir would be okay with this, changing it from the descriptive (“I saw this and aren’t I amazing?) to prescriptive (“If you do this, you could be amazed.”)

Dear Drummers,

Whenever I look at my two boys, I think about dying. After the lights are out and everyone is asleep in the house, I sneak upstairs to my 8 year-olds room and watch him sleep. I’m filled with wonder at the unnamable, ungraspable life force moving in him, shaping him from within, this “Secret One slowly growing a body” as the Hindu poet Jabir once wrote. I can’t help thinking though that someday this boy will have to go to sleep without a father. I often wonder if he’ll take up either of my ceremonial drums or if he’ll hang them on a wall (which I consider a sin) or, like my brother did with our father’s watch and dog tags and turquoise rings build a glass case and display them with his 14 guns, a mausoleum devoted to Yang.

I move downstairs to the three year-olds room and gaze at him sleeping with his mouth open and limbs splayed out in three directions, totally safe and open to the world. I wonder if I will die before the point in his life that that he has memories of me. I wonder if he will take my prayer rug, the rug that all of our ceremonies are conducted on; a rug so full of what the Mayans call Its (remnants of spiritual effluvium) that I think maybe it should not be left in this world when I am gone.

The habit of sneaking in to watch my kids sleep and meditate on my death began when my first son was a week old. I watched him in his darkened crib, a stunned and dizzy new father, repeating to myself again and again, “Don’t touch him...he’ll wake up…you’ll be sorry…up all night like last night…don’t…don’t!” And of course I do. I reach out and take his tiny hand in mine. I hold it and close my eyes and then I feel someone taking my other hand. It is my father, and his other hand is held by his father, and I see a line of men holding hands, generation after generation, passing this bluish glow from hand to hand and into my infant son. And I see that I am not really what matters, the glow matters.

I think constantly about the unfathomable mystery of how we pass through this world, from darkness to darkness (although we really don’t know about that) from sleep to sleep (again, who knows for sure?) carrying the glow through this place we call Earth, how we nurture that glow or how we wound it and twist it. But ultimately, the glow is untouched by us somewhow and yet in some mysterious way it learns through us, or experiences through us, blesses and forgives us and heals us. I think about how if we are lucky and if we are courageous, and can get out of its way, we let it speak through us, and sing and move and love this world through our actions. And I think about John Muir’s lovely words--when we truly look at the world we see that everything is connected by luminous strands—glow connected to glow in every direction, and it all passes, all passes away, and is replaced.

I’m not morbid; it’s just that every night and every morning I think about dying.

So I don’t really need autumn to remind me to meditate on the great mystery of passing in and out of this world. But here we are, surrounded by the riled grey skies and exfoliating air reaching down to pluck the last breath of green from the lavender, that tease of first snow behind every gust. So here we are, in autumn, and we cannot help but meditate on the passing of all things, including ourselves.

The Japanese poet Kiko (d. 1894) says:
That which blossoms
falls, the way of all flesh
In this world of flowers.

And Minamoto-no-Shitago (d. 983) summarizes my life in a few words:

This world-
To what may I liken it?
To autumn fields
Lit dimly in the dusk
By lightning flashes

What the shamanist in me loves about autumn is the knowledge that we need regular exfoliation (losing of the leaves or bark, or more mythically, cleansing of the ever-streaked and pitted surface to allow new life to emerge). One of my favorite shamanist phrases: what happens in nature happens in us.

So as we gather this Friday we will call on our electrical potential to generate a few lightning flashes over our autumn fields using our drums as conductors. We will follow the words of another Japanese poet, Hamon (d. 1804):

In stillness I,
Light-bodied, set out for
the otherworld

See you on Friday,

Jaime