Tuesday, April 29, 2014
I had an enjoyable Skype conversation with a student of the
Foxfire Institute of Shamanic Studies in Berlin, Germany this morning. It’s always a pleasure to chat with
someone who has what I would call soulful eyes.
I first developed an interest in shamanic practices many
years ago while studying under the direction of Dr. Colorado. And yet I believe my sensitivity
to phenomena we typically do not perceive in ordinary day to day reality has
been with me since I was a child.
One experience in the earliest years of my childhood stands out in
particular.
At the tender age of twenty-three I lived among the Lakota
Sioux Native American people on the Rosebud Reservation in southern South
Dakota. I can still vividly recall
driving back to the reservation after making a trip out west to the vicinity of
Rapid City. As I drove back amidst
a landscape completely empty of human habitation I found myself suddenly
overcome by an immense amount of grief.
The grief I felt did not feel as if it belonged to me. It seemed to me that it was a
collective grief experienced by an entire group of people who were no longer
living. I did not see ghosts with
my eyes. I did not hear voices
with my ears. But my heart was
telling me a different story. My
heart was telling me I was traversing a landscape that had been the site of
much suffering. I already knew
this intellectually. To feel grief
in my heart was another matter entirely.
Looking back in hindsight a number of years later I believe
I was experiencing the grief of the Lakota people who lost so much when the
Americas were colonized by people not indigenous to the two continents. How exactly I was able to feel this
grief is not something I can easily describe even now. What is the term for something that
extends beyond your individual self?
I believe the term is transpersonal.
My conversation this morning leads me to reflect on the
gifts I carry within me. And I
wonder if there are perhaps more gifts inside me than I have consciously been
aware of. Exploring your
culture of origin can activate what I would call ancestral memory. It’s my belief that such memory may
literally reside encoded within our DNA.
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