RE-INVENTING MYSELF

'If it's real, it works; if it works, it's real'. So said Jim Tree in The Sacred Way of the Pipe. And I think this applies muchly to the way Leo Rutherford works. Leo has a good dose of the trickster spirit running through him, and he continually bounces you out of the way you thought you saw the world. He has just about the right amount of disrespect for tradition. And, at 83, is as sharp as ever. Though I'm not sure he tells the truth about his age.

I did a couple of long courses with Leo in the late 90s, and they provided a context for me to make a big transition, much bigger than I thought, from one life to the next. And I've just been on the 1st of a series of 3 Sweatlodge weekends with him. It's supposed to be about running Sweatlodges, and it is about that, but I noticed quite quickly uh-oh something else is kicking in. I'm going through the 2nd major transition of my adult life, 20 years on from the first, and it intensified during the weekend. That's why I'm really on this I thought.

I've felt pole-axed, in a good way, since the Sweat on Sunday. That is what sweats often do to me. They knock me sideways, knock all the crap from the surface, and leave me with whatever deeper process is going on. And this may occur around, rather than in, a sweat. Or even, once, just by talking about them. I went to one 2 years ago, and just before I went in I realised with absolute clarity, the sort that runs right through you, that it was finally time to leave the long-term relationship I was in. I had struggled with that for 5 years. I know how to resist change!

And I've been in an intense limbo ever since, very close to myself, a lot of solitude. And last weekend's sweat seemed to begin pushing me down a long birth canal.That which needed to heal is starting to heal. More specifically, and I say this guardedly, I have felt the spirit of an elder, as it were, knocking loudly at my door for some years now. He has been there my whole life, wanting to get in. And he has been more insistent of late, and the feeling of awakening around it reduces me to tears.

At the same time, I have also spent my life on guard, holding back, with a very young side of me that is terrified of life. I've been holding his hand for some years now, and that has helped. But the change over the weekend has been this elder spirit joining me and engaging with the very young me. It feels like he is going to take care of him, and help him change, from now on. And this is why I continue to feel pole-axed, because it is a deep process, a deep change. And it is also why I now feel at the start of a long birth canal, because my life will be able to happen in a new way.

As it happens, Leo is about to start a series of 4 long weekends on the Medicine Wheel. It was on the last such course I was on in 1999 that I re-invented myself - or co-operated with being re-invented. The Medicine Wheel is a great way of reviewing and re-dreaming your life. So I may go on this course too.