In the last piece I began talking about the Medicine Wheel, and I very briefly said what one was – these 4 stones, which stand for different aspects of ourselves, and for the whole universe too. I focussed on the principle of balance at its heart. The Wheel at its simplest is four stones, one in each direction: north south east and west. They also correspond to the elements of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air. In a way, it’s that simple.
There are all sorts of other correspondences to these four stones, for they make a cycle. We have, going from East round to North: birth, childhood, adulthood, old age; spring, summer ,autumn, winter; yellow, red, black, white. These are all in the Wheel I use. You get quite different set-ups in different Wheels. There are these Wheels all over the Americas, no one quite knows where they came from, which I think is great, though central America seems to be the main contender.
In a way, and I reckon most importantly, the Wheel becomes a symbol that sinks into your unconscious, it becomes part of who you are. That was what happened to me almost immediately when I saw my first Medicine Wheel after years of Buddhism. This was in the 90s. I saw this Medicine Wheel and it just had me it intrigued. I knew nothing about it, but it was like wow here's this thing that is a teaching, and it describes everything, and what I loved about it was that it's earthy, it's here, it's not a teaching about up there, or about what's ultimate in a faraway sense. It is a teaching about what's ultimate here right now, because everything's here around you and within you, we contain all within us.
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Ad Break: CHAOS WALK near Wrexham, UK Sun 7th July Free event
I was invited to run my 1st Chaos Shamanism event by Matt Beech at a venue in Wrexham. But that was too organised for the Spirit of Chaos, which removed the venue at a late stage, and foiled all Matt's attempts to set it up as an outdoor workshop. The Spirit of Chaos has decreed that it needs to begin where Shamanism begins: immersed in nature. So we will be walking among 250m year old sandstone, used by prehistoric people, visiting caves and standing on cliff edges. We will go off piste among the brown moss, and we will enjoy. We will meet outside the Bickerton Poacher Pub at 11am, and after that the day will take its own course. All welcome.
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Above all, perhaps, it was the intimate involvement of the earth that grabbed me. The earth as alive and sacred. I had been in a tradition for 17 years where that had been put down. Where it was at, were these otherworldly figures that were not ordinary and human. And when the elements were brought in, they were arranged hierarchically, in progressive levels of refinement. The earth element was at the bottom as the crudest, and that was definitely something you wanted to transcend! All it did was to eventually make me ill and unbalanced.
It isn’t that Buddhism per se is necessarily like that, though I think it often tends in that transcendent direction. It was more that the Buddhism I was around was westernised, it contained the imbalances around the relationship between the body and the spirit that have vitiated western culture for over a millennium. So I was ill, if you like, because western culture is ill – even though it has a lot of good things going for it – and the shamanic outlook, the indigenous outlook, was the cure for me, and therefore can be for the culture. That maybe sounds a bit pretentious or evangelical. It’s not really, it’s more of an observation or an insight.
So my encounter with the Medicine Wheel was deeply healing for me, on a metaphysical level. I've written a whole book on the Medicine Wheel. There's so many things that can be said, that's the beauty of it. The book I wrote was an opportunity to say everything I thought about everything! The Medicine Wheel contains the whole universe – it describes the Cosmos that arises from Chaos - and it's also you, and that's because we are the universe.
OK, let’s just pull back to the word Chaos. We are gradually uncovering its meaning as we go along. It is both simple and multifaceted. I can imagine it could get confusing, because I've been unpacking it in lots of different ways, with many connotations. So if you just remember that Chaos brings us to the heart of things, brings us to what we're really about it, brings us to the centre of the Medicine Wheel. Chaos is that vast Abyss that is at the heart of things, that beautiful soft beating heart at the centre of the universe and at the centre of you. Perhaps the best way of envisioning Chaos is to feel that mystery at the heart of you, that force of life that is always in us, heartfelt and joyful. That is Chaos, in the sense that we don’t know where it comes from, it is just something very deep and fundamental. And that is also the Centre of the Medicine Wheel, Chaos in this sense. And the purpose of the Wheel is to help us to keep coming back to that centre in ourselves, which is easily lost amidst the busyness of everyday life, and the collective currents and beliefs and ideas that sweep us up.
I want to talk about the Medicine Wheel in as simple a way as possible, because that's what we have to do. We have no traditions, but we can borrow them and we can dance between them, and we can do the same with the Medicine Wheel. In a way it's artificial to adopt one that is really complex, because you can have 20 stones if you like, all with these different meanings and its own beauty. My questioning of that wouldn't be so much because it belongs to a foreign culture, because we can indeed adopt it, but because when you get that complex, it moves up to the brain, to the intellect, which in one way is fair enough, because there's all sorts of nuances of meaning there, but you tend to lose that connection with the symbolism once it gets intellectually complex.
As long as it's simple, the unconscious can hold it, you can hold a symbol that is white in the north, red in the South, yellow over there and black over there, you just hold it there, it can become the centre of your dreaming, the centre of your life, the centre of your universe. That's how I've used it, mainly along with the four elements of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air; if you like they are Inspiration, Healing, Incarnation and Perspective, just to make it a bit more concrete. It's a way of describing all those different aspects of who we are in a symbol.
The Wheel is of course round. It affirms the Greek philosopher Plotinus’ dictum that ‘the native motion of the soul is circular.’ You find that throughout the world, these circles, mandalas. We tend to think in a linear way, that we're going from A to B, and we need to think like that for daily life. But the bigger picture, the motion of our souls, is not linear. It circles in an ever-deepening way around its own centre, which is the centre of the Wheel. We are not ‘evolving’: that is a modern, linear, scientific notion, alien to the indigenous way of seeing the world. Rather, we are continually finding balance within the 4 elements, paying attention to one then the other as needed, while letting the bigger theme of who we are, and maybe our place in the scheme of things, take care of itself. It is not for us to know, with our tiny individual consciousness. It is good to feel that mystery of who we are and what it’s all about, just sit with it, be awed by it. That in itself brings us into balance, for we are living from the centre, the trunk and roots of the tree.
So this exploration of the Medicine Wheel will be about how we find that balance about who we are, exploring these different aspects of who we are not just through Fire, Water, Earth and Air, because even that is an abstraction from what we experience. And Chaos Shamanism is always about spotting the abstraction and coming into experience, into the heart and into the senses.
So for Fire, what we experience is the Sun and its warmth. Fire is, if you like, just an idea behind that experience. The same with Water. Unless you live by the sea, your main experience of water is probably going to be rain. I’m talking natural world here, because that is where the Medicine Wheel is based, rather than indoors, where you could say radiators and taps for Fire and Water. It’s not quite the same! And of course the Earth element is the soil, which we can put our hands into, get them dirty. And the Air element is the breeze, we experience Air when it moves.
So Sun, Rain, Soil and Wind. It is very tangible. It keeps us close to experience when we think this way, even if we are indoors, because they are very present to our imaginations in a sensory kind of way. That simple, raw experience has its own delight and beauty, and it draws us right in to the deeper considerations of life at the heart of the Medicine Wheel.
So you may hear or read all sorts of great teachings about the Medicine Wheel – you may read all this stuff that I am coming out with! – but at the end of the day, you need to drop it all and come back to your senses. That’s an interesting expression, isn’t it, coming back to your senses? There’s a lot in it. It says that is where reality is, rather than the abstractions we are in, necessarily, much of the time.
So these teachings are a pointer towards doing that, like the Zen teaching about the finger pointing at the Moon, and not mistaking the finger for the Moon. This is what religion is. Sitting in the teachings, knowing them all, but not moving to where they are pointing. It can be an effort, even a bit scary, to do so. Much easier to be ‘good’ by having a spiritual tag called ‘shamanic’!
So we drop all of that and we come into experience, into the heart and the senses. We feel the warmth of the sun, the rain and the wind on our faces, we dig our fingers into the soil. Nature is so good at bringing us back to ourselves, she reminds us of who we are, which is her. In a way, that's all the Medicine Wheel is doing, that's all that this great project called modern Shamanism is doing, is bringing us back to that experience of the elements, and bringing us back to who we are. What else is there to do, what else is life about, but continually coming back to who we are, remembering who we are?
That's why amongst the Chippewa Cree, and probably other peoples as well, humans are known as the newborn ones, recently arrived, because we're the only species that doesn't know who it is. You look at the other animals, they know how to live, they know who they are. We're the ones who scratch our heads and get out of balance all the time. So that's why we need things like the Medicine Wheel, to show us how to come back into balance, how to orient ourselves - that's why you have the directions there as well. Maybe I'll bring them in also, but I want to keep it simple, because you can get lost in this maze of meanings, you can become a shamanic theologian! And then you’ve missed the whole point.
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