south – Karen's New York Love Affair

The medicine walk: cholla cactus and golden braids

If you have been following this story of the medicine walk, you might be wondering what my longing for a loving relationship has to do with the intention I brought on the walk, and why I chose to ask the lizard that question. I can tell you two things about this. One is that the question arose spontaneously, as did the entire interaction with the lizard. And it is this spontaneous arising in nature that is part of the gift of the medicine walk, vision fast, and other work in nature. One never knows what is going to happen. And what happens is outside the realm of our usual experience. This is why we go to nature in the first place—to gain insight and understanding from a place that is different from our usual thought processes and ways of interacting in the world. As my story continues I will draw together all the pieces of the events on the medicine walk into a cohesive whole that makes sense.

The second piece about asking about my desire for a loving relationship is that this is part of the work with my inner man. I mentioned previously that I am claiming my inner father. Yet the inner masculine is also my inner lover. And the type of relationship I have with both these aspects of my inner masculine will affect the quality of relationships I have with men in my life, especially in the area of intimate, romantic relationships. Looked at one way, this means that the desire for a great romantic relationship is a strong motivation to do the inner work to have good relationships with the inner masculine aspects. But that’s kind of a backwards way of looking at it, as you may know if you are involved in inner work yourself. The gifts of looking within are the goal of the work, and the benefit this may have in our outer lives and relationships is secondary. (Or so the theory goes!) But the truth is, our relationship with ourself is the one constant that is there throughout our life, while outer relationships come and go.

So, to continue my story, I left off at the point where I was sitting near the golden cactus. I noticed it was prickly, to keep other creatures away (like me). And beautiful, to draw them close (like me). Suddenly I wanted to know what it would take. If only I could DO SOMETHING, like flog myself with the cactus, cutting my arms, or run across the desert for miles and miles, to make it happen. I felt my powerlessness. Do I have to move to California or New York to improve my chances of meeting the kind of man with whom I want to have a relationship, who is as deeply committed as I am to the inner journey? Does he have to be on the same spiritual path, or can it be someone like Larry, who runs and meditates and has a deep inner awareness, and holds the sacred ceremony of the vision fast? He can sense himself and his unfoldment, though his inner work has been on a different path than mine. And then there is that mysterious factor of strong physical attraction, which I would want to feel with my mate. When will I find all of this in one man, I wondered.

I felt into the sadness in my chest, and the longing to be seen, regarded as special, loved and cherished—from a lover man whom I felt passionate about. And I felt the helplessness and hopelessness about ever having that. I believed I don’t get to have it, won’t ever get to have it. The hopeless sad powerless longing felt like when I was a child. And cactus was saying don’t look outside for what you want, just do your inner work. (And I remembered Larry saying what we all want is on the inside.) That felt frustrating and unsatisfying too, but I also noticed the feeling tone of feeling powerless to ever have what I want, and hopeless, felt like when I was a little girl, wanting mom and dad’s love and attention and for them to think I was special.

I remembered being about four, having these feelings. Longing for love, closeness, attention. Feeling ugly and unloveable. The hurt of it all. So I started talking to little Karen, telling her I could feel her hurt, and I was there for her, loved her, thought she is beautiful and precious, and that I cared about how she felt. I asked if she could hear me, but she seemed pretty absorbed in her hurt and sadness. She didn’t seem to be aware of me. With my eyes closed, I imagined drawing her near to me, and I unbraided her two braids. I touched her hair, telling her that her hair was beautiful, soft and wavy from the braids, and that she is special. I could see her uniqueness and the qualities in her that are different from most little girls. This showed in her face as a seriousness and strength.

I held her close, telling her she is special, and felt a very full, loving feeling, deep pink, in my heart. The pink fullness was also between us and through us, a unified field of it. Then I saw her as free to be who she was—happy and light, a tremendous force of nature, running through the landscape.

Although this experience wasn’t the union with the masculine that I longed for, it was very satisfying, and seemed to be a piece of the puzzle of healing so that I am ready for a relationship. Reparenting my inner child, releasing her pain, allowing her to be free to be herself. With this work done, I no longer needed to seek someone on the outside to give her the love and attention she had been longing for. To honour and mark what had occurred, I did a small ceremony. Earlier, when I crossed the threshold, I had a nose bleed. I buried the kleenex with my blood on it at the base of the cactus, as a gift of thanks from my body to the earth, and a symbol of letting go of the suffering from the past. I marked the tiny grave with a black stone, and placed a piece of the cactus that had broken off on the flat black stone, together with a tiny red stone.

This concluded the second part of my medicine walk, which I thought of as being related to the west side of the wheel. The inner masculine work is the work of the west. But clearly the work with the inner child is the work of the south. Ruth reflected this back to me later on when I told the story to her and Larry. And she made the beautiful piece of art pictured here, showing the hands loosening the braid.

The work with the little girl seemed like a possible completion of my medicine walk. It was so wonderful to have cared for her in such a way that her suffering was relieved and she was freed to be her true, magnificent self in the world. As often happens when fasting, my thoughts turned to food and I wondered if I should call it a day and go back to base camp to eat! But I had it in my mind to do some further ceremony for the north and the east…

The medicine walk: hiking up the canyon and the ceremony of fire

I have been writing about the medicine walk I went on in the Eureka Valley in California, east of the Sierra Mountains. So far I’ve described the process of mirroring for intention. The intention I formed was “I am mother and father to myself. I have the strength and take the time to care for my hurt self.” Now I’m going to tell you the story of what happened when I went on the medicine walk.

I set out shortly after dawn, with the intention of staying out until dusk, and fasting from food, human company, and built structures. So this medicine walk was like a mini vision fast. I had a sense of the supportive presence of Ruth and Larry in base camp, and all the fasters hidden away in the hills and canyons around the camp. I decided to hike up a canyon where I knew no other fasters were staying.

Walking up the canyon, I created a beautiful threshold crossing once I was out of sight of base camp. I made two cairns of stones to walk between, marked with vials of sparkly red glass beads. I was worried about not being able to find the threshold when I returned, especially if it was dark, so I retraced my steps after I had crossed the threshold, and noted markers in the landscape to help me: creosote trees and the tip of the ridge. I also noticed that the threshold was slightly to the left of the centre of the wash.

I noticed I was walking into the east, and partly up the wash I came upon some bushes with beautiful yellow flowers. Flowers always seem like such a precious gift in the desert. This dry wash must collect enough rain once or twice a year to allow these flowers to grow and bloom here. Further up the canyon I saw three yellow stones on the ground. Another sign of the east. I picked one up and tasted it, wondering if it was sulfur. It tasted salty like the desert and had tiny crystals in it. I gave Reiki to the earth to thank the land for this gift.

At the top of the canyon was an amazing place with tiger- and leopard-patterned stone walls, in orange and yellow and black. There were lots of little hidey-holes for rodents. I noticed two crazy webs that could be the work of black widow spiders. Very sticky, with strands in three dimensions rather than the flat, neatly patterned two-dimensional web that most spiders make. I found a place in the shade to keep the water I’d brought for the day. Then I looked around for a good place to do my first ceremony, working with anger.

I found a gravelly place in the wash that was quite flat, and dug a hole in the gravel using a larger stone. I set up four coloured direction stones around me, and the strands of coloured beads for each direction that I carry in my medicine bear-pouch, Graham, whom I claimed and named in a trip to the desert several years ago. Maybe I’ll tell you that story one day. I meditated for a while, turning so that I spent some of the time facing in each of the four directions, sensing how the energies felt in each direction.

I’d brought a letter that I’d received from a friend right before the trip, in which she had said many hurtful things about me and my anger. What timing! This was someone I’d known for twenty years, and had shared the deepest parts of myself with. I had felt very hurt and upset by her letter, as well as angry. So I began speaking to this woman, telling her how I felt about the letter, and the hurt I felt that she didn’t know me after all these years. I told her the hurt I felt that she didn’t care about me. I told her all the things I’ve felt frustrated and hateful and angry towards her about.

When I’d been talking about the letter with Ruth and Larry I’d wondered whether I should read it again during the ceremony. Ruth asked me “Would you read this letter to your inner child?” What a brilliant question. Of course I wouldn’t read a hurtful letter to a young child, and I wouldn’t dream of re-hurting the child by repeating something hurtful. So this guidance helped me learn something, and I knew I didn’t want to read the letter again. So when I’d said everything that’s been unsaid, including my caring about my friend over these years, and holding space for her, I said I was giving her back the shit she’d put on me.

Then I used the element of fire to burn the four or five pages of the letter, along with some sweet grass and a tiny bit of cedar and sage from my medicine pouch. Once the letter had burned to ash, I repeated my intention, thanked the spirits of the land, and covered the hole with gravel.

I felt satisfied with the beauty and simplicity of the ceremony, and connected with myself and the land around me. It seemed that this ceremony to deal with my anger was a significant step in changing my behaviour. It also seemed like a celebration of the aliveness and life energy that the anger brings. I wasn’t denying the anger or suppressing it. Rather, I expressed it in a way that did not hurt myself or anyone else. In this way, I claimed the strength of the red. Beginning with the red beads that I used to mark the threshold, and culminating in the anger ceremony, this part of the medicine walk was my ceremony of the south.

My intention was to do a ceremony in each of the four directions, moving around the wheel as the day went on. This way I would be invoking the energy of each of the directions to help me claim my intention. I’ll tell you what happened next…

A lifetime of anger – breaking the cycle

As I have written previously, the south is the place where we feel our emotions and act on them in an unmediated way. When we mature from childhood into adolescence, moving around the wheel from the south to the west (from summer to fall), we start to be aware of the effects our actions have on others, and gain deeper understanding about why we feel the way we do, and who we really are.

I’d like to illustrate this movement by sharing something of what I have learned working with anger. This has been a long process of discovery, involving years of healing and deepening understanding. My latest trip to the desert to assist at the vision fast brought a new layer of healing, growth, and maturity. So over the next little while I’m going to share with you what I have learned, both because it may be useful in your own inner exploration of anger, and because it illustrates so beautifully how the ceremony of the vision fast and the teaching of the four directions can help us on our inner journey.

Intentions and claiming

When people go on a vision fast, at least in the form of ceremony that we use at The School of Lost Borders, they state the intention of their fast before they start their solo time. Usually the guides will spend some time with each faster, helping them clarify their intention until it is in the form of a sentence or two, beginning with I am a woman… or I am a man… and followed by the qualities the faster is claiming.

During the time in basecamp, Ruth, Larry, and I worked with each other to clarify our intentions for a solo walk that we took while the fasters were out fasting. So when it was my turn, Ruth and Larry listened while I said what I wanted to claim, and they helped me clarify my intention. This was a magical process, because through talking and exploring with them, a clarity and understanding of what I needed to do emerged that was completely unexpected…

As I have mentioned previously, I went to the desert hoping to do some work with my anger. I have lost friends in the past when I expressed my anger, probably because I didn’t do it skillfully and it scared them, or hurt them, and the feeling of fear or hurt was stronger than the feelings of caring for me that they might have had. The fascinating thing about this is that my anger usually has arisen as a defense because I was feeling hurt or afraid because of what the other person had done! So it is perpetuating a cycle of fear or hurt.

But, I also want to remind you that anger also contains passion, aliveness, and creativity. So although expressing anger in an unmediated way (yelling, swearing, throwing things, hitting a rock with a hammer, thrashing around in bed next to your partner, kicking or punching the wall) may have undesired consequences, it also has a hidden treasure that is worth retaining. I feel the excitement of the passion I feel for this treasure as I write, and look forward to continuing this exploration over the next few postings. More to come!

Red hot summer

Summer is here and it’s a hot one. At least in BC and the Pacific Northwestern states. I’ve previously written about the Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters of the wheel of the year, and now it’s time to take a look at summer.

Summer is in the south quarter of the wheel, and it is the time of childhood innocence, compassion, and strength. Red is the colour, and the entry Red wheel rolling gives you an idea of the playfulness of the south. It is the time when growth is lush and bountiful, and we get to kick back and relax, soaking up the warmth of the sun. Life is bursting everywhere, and the aliveness of this is one of the qualities that the south brings us.

Mouse is the animal of the south, and if you imagine things from a mouse’s point of view, life is very simple. We see what is in front of us, at ground level. Details, and the parts of the world that are very concrete and tangible.

Red can be seen in the rushing of the blood, whether through exercise or sensual pursuits, and indeed sexual energy is strong in the south part of the wheel. All of the sensual expressions and experiences of the body. Embodiment is what the south can teach us. Imagine the turning of the wheel from spring to summer as a time to bring your inspiration and spiritual awareness (the gifts of the east) into concrete, embodied form for your people.

Warm summer blessings!