It occurred to me as I sat in my local cafe 2 days ago (my lockdown way of being around actual people for a while) that a lot of these soul ailments you get nowadays - chronic fatigue, auto-immune stuff, irritable bowel, fibromyalgia - involve unlived passion. I can't prove it. But it immediately rang true for the first person I mentioned it to. And it has been true for myself, suffering chronic fatigue from 1992 onwards, and getting well as I listened to something in myself, and lived it, that I had overlooked for years in the interests of 'fitting in'.
The thing is that conventional society with its norms doesn't have much room for, or even approval of, people with a creative passion within them. It can't be controlled, and it breaks the rules of how a 'normal' person should live. And that is why such people may get ill. It takes courage to live from that daemon within. And many people, of course, become identified with that illness, it becomes who they are, and they can spend decades looking to conventional medicine for a cure and needing to impress on others that they really are ill. Which they are. Because we live in a society that has forgotten the connection between body and soul.
And I think that talking in terms of a creative passion, or a daemon, is our way of describing what in an indigenous society would be looked at as the Spirits having come calling and made you an offer you can't refuse. The Shamanic Illness. Our culture sees the individual as separate, on an heroic journey unique to themselves. For an indigenous person, the self is relational, you do not have an identity separate from your relationships with those around you and with those who came before you and indeed the whole natural world. This view of the self is closer to how things are. Our modern atomised individual, with their whole string of 'rights' just compounding the illusion.
So your daemon, your creativity, isn't 'yours', it belongs to the universe; it needs to be courageously lived, and put at the service of others. Then you will gradually become well.
By the same token, our demons which trouble us aren't 'ours' either. They are spirits visiting us, and we can form a relationship with them (see Eduardo Duran: Healing the Soul Wound.) And a traditional view of mental illnesses would be this too: they are spirits visiting an essentially healthy person.
And so what is it that we become if we live this passion? Particularly if it takes us in the direction of directly helping people? This is that knotty question of are we shamans? And here is an interesting take on it, which I got the other day off Lewis Mehl Madrona, whose online course on Two -Eyed seeing I am currently attending. He said a bunch of Lakota in North Dakota who do this sort of work were recently talking about what they should call themselves. 'Healer' was presumptuous, Medicine Man was like something out of a spaghetti western. So they settled in the end on 'Fix-it men'. I thought I can go with that. I can be a Fix-it man. Maybe this blog should be called The Global Fix-it Person 😂But seriously, I have a wave of nice feeling wash over me at anything that makes me the same as everyone else, that dissolves my ego and keeps my feet firmly on the ground.
No comments:
Post a Comment