TRADITION, CREATIVITY and LEARNING from the SPIRITS

I used to attend Sweatlodges in a field on Exmoor. run by a guy called Bethlehem Taylor.The guy had something, there was a power to the lodges. He said they were Lakota lodges. Now I'm not sure Bethlehem had been near a Lakota in his life. But what he said was that spirit guides who were Lakota turned up and showed him how to run it. And of course from some people's point of view, to do this is charlatanry, cultural appropriation and probably a host of other sins that we could enjoy damning him for. I was never quite sure what to make of it, all I did know was that the Sweats worked, which in my view is what matters.

And then more recently I was on the UK Shamanic Gathering, and someone there had been shown by her spirits how to perform a particular traditional healing ceremony over the last 2 years, one she knew nothing about, and then they suggested she run a workshop on it at the Gathering. Someone else who had grown up around this ceremony was at the workshop and said that it had indeed been done correctly.

So for me this adds another layer to the complex issue of what is traditional and authentic, and that the Spirits may well be intervening to move things along, and why not? 

I think there are 2 principles that need to be deeply honoured, and sometimes they can seem to be in conflict: on the one hand, there is the sense of tradition that indigenous people have, that has been built up over long periods, that has a lot of power and which we can learn from. And this takes a lot of time and a lot of self-knowledge, and any replication is not to be done lightly.

And on the other hand, we have no long-standing traditions of our own, and it would be wrong for all sorts of reasons to import foreign ways of doing things wholesale. We are in the early stages of creating something that is our own. And we need to honour our own creativity and openness in this, and really run with it.

And there is a pitfall from both sides: on the one hand, we have lost respect and understanding of tradition and its depth, and we can launch in as healers or whatever without the long training in self-knowledge that is needed, we can be too quick to make it up as we go along. But on the other hand, there are plenty of paralysing voices that tell us we can hardly breathe without the permission of a foreign elder, and that we must stick to tradition and certainly not adapt.

So we need both a feel for the integrity and power of tradition, and the message that this is a slow path that needs a lot of self-knowledge; and we need at the same time to be very open, to be creative, to do things that speak to people, that are indigenous for us. And part of this openness is the idea that the spirits will show us what to do, and they may even show us ways that originate in foreign cultures, and that it is fine to regard that training as authentic.