SHAMANIC ILLNESS and the FIXIT MEN

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.

OUR COVID UNDERWORLD

 Here is an astrological piece I have just written:

When people come to me for readings, there is usually some major transit going on, and that is why they have come, though they usually don't know that. And an important part of my job is talking about how to BE during that time of transit, and that is related to whether it is Uranus, Neptune or Pluto that is at work.

Whichever it is, the outer planets operate from outside of ordinary waking consciousness. They are not part of the conscious endowment that the inner planets represent and which we can get to know and use effectively. If you want to learn effectively, look at your Mercury to understand your particular way of learning. And so on.

However, our daily life with the inner planets can give us the illusion that we are in control of our lives. We are indeed in control, but only of the small daily picture. There are greater forces of the Spirit that sweep through us and sweep through humanity, and that is when people come to us for readings. These are times when the old no longer works, because it has had the life withdrawn from it by Pluto, or Neptune is showing us that what seemed so real is illusory, or trickster Uranus is upsetting those certainties to which we had anchored ourselves.

The only way forward is to tune into these greater forces for change and surrender to them, sense the alembic in which we are being slowly reduced to what is essential, the chrysalis in which we are being magically transformed, and to dwell in the not-knowingness of that. The not-knowing place, 'negative capability' as Keats put it, is difficult for us, for we like our certainties, but they are illusory. The outer planets show us this, they initiate us into what is real. And when we are tuned in to these deeper processes, sense and meaning can return to our lives, but not in a way that is obviously graspable. Being open is of itself meaningful.

And what is true of the individual can also be true of a collective, though whether the outcome has greater value than what came before is a moot point. And since the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of this January, the world has been plunged by the coronavirus into Pluto's Underworld. And there we remain. As is usual, Pluto leaves enough for the processes of daily life to continue in a limited way, but not much more than that. All else is in the alembic, the crucible, the chrysalis, being re-shaped. And as is also usual, this Underworld experience seems to drag on and on. It is not a time for most of us for moving forward and being outwardly creative. It is a time for sitting with what is, surrendering to what is, and feeling the possibilities of the new brewing slowly beneath the surface.

I can only speak for the UK, but we have been in this Underworld for a long time, ever since the Brexit referendum in 2016, whose outcome destroyed a major part of the identity of so many people – that of EU citizen – which is why the backlash was so strong. At that time Pluto was coming up to oppose the UK Moon, having hard -aspected our Sun, Angles and Node in the preceding years. Pluto doesn’t care about human values. He is not on the left or on the right. He is on the side of renewal, and that renewal and rebirth may not be something we find ourselves in agreement with!

So we have had the Underworlds of both Brexit and Covid. And our Charon the ferryman is Boris Johnson, who has Moon in Scorpio and was himself dunked into the river Styx by Covid, but who managed to clamber back on board. A guy who many of us cannot stand and do not trust. Maybe that is why Pluto chose Johnson. So maybe we need to look again.

I am writing this piece because ever since Saturn then Pluto started moving forward a few weeks ago, I have been feeling out of sorts. I was thinking maybe I need to see more actual people. Or maybe I need to do more. But I was OK a few weeks ago. And I am also thinking that Saturn and Pluto are now starting to move us out of this double Underworld, and I am feeling that. But we are also still in it. And when I remind myself of that, all seems OK again. I have learnt about being in the Underworld over the last 28 years.

So the Covid Underworld was catalysed by the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn on Jan 12 this year. Saturn will move finally into Aquarius in mid-December, definitively away from Pluto, and I think we will look back and see that as the beginning of the end of the Covid crisis. Already the cracks in the lockdown are appearing, as not just Wales and Scotland, but the north of England start to go their own way. And this ties in nicely with a theme of Brexit, which is the fragmentation of the UK into its constituent parts. And the reunification of Ireland (which is strongly suggested in the 1922 UK chart relocated to Belfast.)

So for now, the astrological message seems to be that we will remain in the Covid Underworld for the next couple of months, so be patient, watch the horizon for those glimmers of the future, but do not strain towards them just yet. In December, not just Saturn but Jupiter too, which played its part at the start of Covid, will enter Aquarius and begin a new cycle for the world. It won’t be all at once, but we will be on our way out, at last. And for the UK, we will definitively be leaving the Brexit Underworld too.

TWO-EYED SEEING

I was recently on an 8 week online course run by Lewis Mehl-Madrona in which a different indigenous healer from around the world was interviewed each week, and there was also opportunity for questions and answers. Lewis is soon to run another course, which I will also be attending. Here is what he says about it and here is the link for joining the course.

 

Two-Eyed Approaches to Healing Trauma

Tuesday Evenings, 6pm to 7:30pm, for 8 weeks, starting 27 October 2020

We had so much fun in our last course that we decided to do another. This time we want to explore approaches to healing trauma in indigenous communities from both indigenous and contemporary neuroscience perspectives. We want to go more deeply in the practices that work and how to apply them

We will meet live for 90 minutes on Tuesdays at 6pm Eastern Time in the USA. Sessions will be recorded for those who cannot attend or are in other time zones.

The Inspiration:

“Two-eyed seeing” is a concept that was originated by Elder Albert Marshall of Sydney, Nova Scotia, and Cape Breton University to give indigenous epistemology and knowledge equal status with mainstream scientific perspectives and knowledge. In M'iqmaq, the word is Etuaptmunk. In English, it means the idea of explanatory pluralism. Within most indigenous cultures, the mind is not considered separately from body, community, and spirituality, unlike the silos created in the dominant culture. Healing must involve the body, the community, and the spirits. In this nine-part online series, we are going to use the two-eyed seeing concept to explore how to work with trauma from both an indigenous perspective and contemporary neuroscience and psychological research. We are especially interested in the role that trauma plays in addictions and in the so-called “severe mental illnesses,” and how our approach to people in distress must also be trauma informed. We will explore Indigenous approaches to healing trauma related to childhood, historical and ongoing violence, domestic violence, and intergenerational trauma.

LIFE, DEATH AND COVID

I was asked yesterday what I thought the government should do about Covid, and I said I thought it should just let it happen. I'm not intending this as a political point, for I try to keep politics out of this blog. I'm intending it as a shamanic point, in the sense that the longer this lockdown goes on, the more I feel it is about fighting nature. This is something we do because it expresses the basic mindset we have of nature as something to be conquered, and in-so-doing we come to feel we are gods. Hubris and heartlessness. Buddhism calls this the realm of the 'jealous gods', who try to chop down the tree of life, or kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Sure, take precautions against disease. But 'disease' is also a form of life, and we need to come into relationship with it, we even need to find a way of expressing gratitude to coronavirus, because it is teaching us a lot. About becoming slower and more reflective and more connected to others. And less driven by work-as-an-end-in-itself, a strange obsession that dominates us for historico-religious reasons. (The Protestant Work Ethic.) Coronavirus is not an enemy.

 

And it teaches us about death. It has just the right level of fatality to get us to think and debate. Much lower, and we could ignore it like the flu. Much higher, and it really would be a deadly disease that requires drastic measures, including the sacrifice of large parts of the economy. As it is, it can be argued either way. In my opinion, the fear of Covid, which I experience as a soggy blanket enveloping us, but which I do not experience myself, is out of proportion. It highlights our attitude to death. And that is a huge subject.

 

And I think from a shamanic point of view, death is nothing to be afraid of. Life is the dream of Spirit, and like Spirit is ultimately unknowable. Death is no different. Life teaches us to trust death.

 

“And because I love this life. I know I shall love death as well." (Tagore). Death is to be cherished.

 

Life is a series of transitions, each of which brings us closer to death. In this sense, death is just life in another form. Those transitions may be very difficult at times, but ultimately there is new life in them, and our suffering is often our resistance to the change that life requires, and a clinging on to what is safe and known. Life can be ruthless in this sense, for its law is change and unfoldment. And we may look back on a period of change, thankful through gritted teeth for what it has made us, in the knowledge that we would never have volunteered for such change.

 

It is natural for humans to be afraid of death. We project into the future and we see it coming. And it means the end of all that we currently know. If you are a great Medicine person, then you are great precisely because you do not need to hang onto the known. And so Spirit can flow unobstructedly through you. And I guess we are all open to deep change to different degrees. It is a choice we can keep making. If we choose, we can back off from those wake-up calls that life regularly gives us. My Dad used to throw money at them and carry on as before.

 

But I think our culture has a particular difficulty with death, over and above the natural human fear. There is a pervasive philosophy – or rather, superstition - that only matter exists, of which consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon. And this means death is an extinction. It is a nihilist philosophy espoused by the unsophisticated, however many university degrees they may have.

 

A moment’s reflection shows us that there is something as weird as you can possibly imagine going on, because this reality around us, in all its depth, is a construct of the brain. The idea of the brain itself is also a construct. These constructs serve a purpose, they make a kind of sense to experience which is unique to each of us, but within which there is sufficient overlap for us to be able to communicate. It is staggering when you have those moments where you realise that yes, this reality is just a construct on a deep level. Those moments where life has slowed down enough for us to see these baffling things. Slowed down, maybe, in a lockdown kind of way.

 

See ‘The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’ by Oliver Sacks for an account of people with neurological injuries which resulted in the breakdown of some of the categories of reality that we take for granted.

 

So the more we can feel the contingent, constructed nature of our experience, the more evanescent it becomes, the less there is to hold onto, and the more death comes to be one more experience within that flow. Death and life are in a sense the same thing, they are just different experiences within the same flow of consciousness. Death does not have the limitations that we experience within life. For some, this is terrifying. For others, it is liberating. And for many of us, it is probably a bit of both.

 

I have just been reading Irvin Yalom’s memoirs, ‘Becoming Myself’. He is a famous, and leading, psychotherapist in the US who has written some great stories from the psychotherapy room. But he has this place I can’t go to, in which he treats death as an extinction, and dogmatically leads his patients away from other views because, he says, they are just false comfort. For me there is a soullessness in this approach, despite his wonderful and insightful humanity in other ways. Now this guy is certainly not unsophisticated, despite what I said earlier. So what is it about?

 

I view the idea that death is an extinction as a kind of soul loss. There is a brutality about it that I don’t think is informed by natural experience, which is that Life and Spirit are ultimately benign. We are taken care of, there is some kind of continuity after death, even though we don’t know, and probably can’t know, what that is. In his 1959 Freeman interview with the BBC (on Youtube, which I highly recommend), Jung says that his elderly clients do not have dreams that suggest an extinction. Rather, they suggest life continuing. As Jung says, this does not ‘prove’ that there is life after death. But, as he continues, the correct way to live is according to nature, and nature does not behave as though there is an extinction. I call this sound shamanic reasoning!

 

In Yalom’s case, he grew up poor and Jewish in New York, and he has never wanted to talk about what happened to his European relatives in the Holocaust, all of whom were exterminated. After the Shoah, for many, God no longer existed. I think there is something very bleak driving him under his ‘rationalist’ philosophy. I think a one-sided rationalism, which so characterises our culture, is a kind of soul loss.

 

Nowadays we have death as extinction. Before that, we had death as the threat of eternal hell. What an appalling, perverted thought that is. What a crude, heartless way of controlling people. That thought, death-as-grim-reaper, is still within us, alongside the other image of death-as-extinction. For really these are just images of something we know nothing about. All this makes for an confused and exaggerated fear of death, that is fuelling our collective response to Covid. Death for many of us is such an appalling idea, that advocating an acceptance of the low Covid fatality rate is seen as callous, of which I have been accused a number of times on FB. Someone always wheels that one out when I talk about changing our relationship to Covid.

 

So I think Covid is an opportunity to reflect not just on how we live – and there seems to be a collective level of reflection on that occurring – but also on our attitude to death, and I have not seen much of that. And that is maybe because Covid has become so loaded with fear for many people that it is difficult to speak of these things in public.

SEX

A few weeks ago I picked up a Penguin Modern Classic, 'In Praise of Older Women', by Stephen Vizinczey, which is basically the author's memoirs as a teenager growing up in Hungary. He found that older women made much better lovers than his fellow-teenagers, who did not know what they were doing and did not treat him very well. And he wrote the book because, having moved to America, he found that older women were not valued as they had been in Hungary, and he wanted to change that perception.

Anyway, I am now reading his later novel, ‘An Innocent Millionaire’, in which he says at one point: "Sex is a mixed blessing. This news is old enough, yet it is every day's news. Men and women are not made for mutual satisfaction. Women cannot always flow, and even when they do, they well up slowly, while men are quick as torrents - they are primed by nature to burst forth at different times."

 

I’d suggest that a ‘Shamanic’ take on this predicament begins by trusting it. Our modern approach is to think we know better than nature, and to think in terms of where nature has got things wrong. Or, in this case probably, to invent an ‘evolutionary’ argument about numbers of offspring and taking care of them, which I think would at best be only a thin slice of the full picture, and even then speculative and prosaic.

 

We have forgotten to trust nature and to trust Spirit, and to sit loosely, and to frequently not know. Why are some people ‘short-sighted’? Has nature made a mistake that we need to ‘correct’? Or do these people just see differently, and what is the nature of their seeing, and what can we learn from that? And I think there always remains an element of mystery, and that gives us humility.

 

And it is the same with sex and this ‘incompatibility’ between men and women. Note the author is not claiming that nature has got it wrong. He is just observing a truth. So why has nature made men and women in these different ways? There is no fixed answer, just various contemplations we can go on.

 

For myself, I would begin with the idea that maybe there is something for both men and women to absorb from each other to do with the general nature of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ consciousness. At that moment of intensified intimacy and openness, we meet the very different way in which the other gender works, and on an energetic level, maybe we absorb something of that. This is maybe part of the bliss, the sense of wholeness, of completion.

 

We men maybe have to learn patience and consideration in our rush to completion, to be present-oriented and feeling-oriented rather than goal-oriented. And maybe women need to feel OK with what they want, and not just brush it to one side because they think it is not important, that the other matters more than they do, and because they want to be liked? And maybe these reflect wider principles to do with how we live and finding the balance within, a long-term and gradual process which is the whole purpose of this shamanic way. And of course it fits in nicely with Jung’s idea of the animus and anima, and men and women finding that other half – which is their soul, and their guide to it – in the second half of life. Which is something I observe all the time when I do astrology readings.

 

So I am just speculating, there are no final answers. But I think it begins with trusting in the wisdom of Spirit and of nature. And, as ever, not judging, not thinking that one gender has got it 'right' and that the other is 'wrong'. And not judging our 'performance'. It is not a 'performance', it is a natural interaction, it is what it is, nature has made this joyful thing for us, and any notion of success and failure is unhelpful.

Fairy Hunt

Out hunting fairies near Birch Tor with Claire Casely today. We were well-looked after, and were soon led astray into a hidden gully full of wonders. Eventually we ended up where I had planned, at the tree in the lower picture. Thank you pixies for a great afternoon  

THE SHOCKING TRUTH

The shocking truth is that no-one is in control. We collectively create kings and governments and religions to re-assure ourselves that someone knows what is going on and is in control. At the same time, we kick and rebel against these authorities that we have created, to persuade ourselves that we are free agents. We do not admit to ourselves the re-assurance we get from the authorities we kick against, often through excessive mistrust of them.

And it is at times like the present, where it is clear that governments are not in control (and actually never were) that we can see the truth of this. It is very unsettling for many people: they cannot live with the existential anxiety of not feeling looked after. So they go into a desperate conformism. Or they invent fantastical stories of who is really controlling things, which they then kick strongly against but which, I suggest, they are also secretly re-assured by. Their need for others to believe what they believe is strong, and that says a lot. We want our sense of independence and agency, and we also don't want it. Like teenagers :)

 

We are alone, and when we realise this, we have the freedom and power to shape our lives. We no longer have limiting beliefs which get in the way of the intentions of Spirit, at least not to the same extent. To live this Shamanic Path, we need to stand outside all those one-sided and limiting and partial tides of belief that sweep through society, and that are based on fear of that openness to Spirit, that inner guide, which is the real reason we are here.

 

“How small, of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” (Samuel Johnson)

 

So I am having the thought that maybe I won't vote in an election again, on principle. The principle is that our politics are founded on one-sidedness, that cannot see the values of the other parties, and I want to make a stand that says I am about something beyond all of that. I am beyond Brexit and Remain too. Anything that divides people, though I will still try to appreciate the values that are important to people, from whatever part of the political spectrum. What I stand for is the joyousness and expansiveness and meaning that comes from not being identified with any particular standpoint or position.

 

I do not expect this of most people. It would destroy them psychologically to take away too many of their certainties. Look at how crazy the UK has gone since 2016, as first the certainty and identity of EU membership was taken away, and then Covid.

 

We Shamans can use these crises, because we are also still partial beings, we get caught up in these things too, though hopefully not to the same extent. We will also experience the discomfort and anxiety that come with crises, but we are able to sit with that and reflect and be changed by it, rather than shifting into blame and a new set of limiting beliefs. It is a great opportunity for us.

 

And it is also a great opportunity to observe and to learn from the people around us. We get to know plenty about human nature at these times, and what is therefore really going on under the surface in the quieter times. Just how one-sided people are in their thoughts, and how easily they slip into fear, for example. The lockdown fear has been like a blanket closing in, that I sometimes make my own private protest against, just to keep it at bay. Like wearing my Live Dangerously T-Shirt, bought in response to a well-meaning friend who exhorted me to 'stay safe' :)

 

No, we Shamans do not have the false security of collective opinions and collective acceptance to fall back on. We are not identified with any particular way of seeing the world, because we understand that it is all stories; that we need more than one story about anything to avoid dogmatism; and that ultimately it is all the Great Mystery anyway. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of that, and that is where the true security lies: in the continual creative outpouring of life itself, which can never be pinned down or predicted.

 

We Shamans are alone. It is not easy to find companions along the way, who know what we are talking about. We may have plenty of friends – we probably do, because it is in our nature to be of service. And maybe one or two people, if we are fortunate, who we can really talk about this stuff with. But that lonely place isn’t always so bad. Often loneliness is simply loneliness for ourselves. Get on your own, let all those other psyches drift away, get away from the computer and you have just you, and if you just sit there with yourself it is a deep experience, and it can be joyful, and the Spirits rejoice, because they want us to experience our Spirit. It feeds them when we do this. And in this aloneness we can experience our agency, that really it is up to us how we shape our lives, and there is freedom and power in that realisation.

 

And yes, the loneliness can be actual loneliness too, for we are relational beings, we do not exist in isolation, who we are is also everyone we are connected to. And that can be a bit tough sometimes. But remember: your spirit helpers are always there with you, and they may feel you have forgotten about them if you are sitting there feeling lonely. They are your friends, and are always with you in a deep way. They may have particular forms and personalities, or you may just have a general sense of spirit help around you. Either way, it doesn’t matter.

 

This is where the Existentialists get it wrong. They say we are ultimately alone in a universe that has no inherent meaning, only that meaning which we create in our lives. They are so wrong. Meaning is something already there if we listen to ourselves and act on that. The Universe is replete with meaning. And when we listen to ourselves, we realise that we are connected to everything and that we are cared for. And it is good to have periods of solitude and ‘loneliness’ so that we can find that deep centre and sense of connection within. That is where the real security lies, and the real freedom that others will sense, and who in their turn will feel free to be who they are, instead of looking over their shoulders to check on who they ‘should’ be.

 

A few nights ago I dreamed that I was going to meet Carl Jung in the middle of the Amazon jungle. This dream came out of quite a deep decision I had made not to get involved in a relationship unless it felt really right, and it felt like my whole being coming together in a new way. And this dream image was a Mandala, the jungle being the circle, and the Self, the point of balance, being Jung in the middle. 

 

And there felt to be something deeply natural and easy about going to meet Jung, it was saying that the Jungian Self – the central point of balance in the Medicine Wheel – is something deeply natural and easy, we don’t have to ‘try’. (Jung was known for his ability to understand and form relationships with indigenous people.) And this sense of naturalness was reinforced by the substance of the Mandala being the Amazon Jungle – raw and primal nature. And the Amazon is the biggest jungle on earth – it is beyond our easy grasp. So this suggests that the Self we are growing into is limitless and infinitely connected to everything else.

 

So this is the naturalness that I was referring to: it seems to others like we are just being simply ourselves, and we are, but it is usually something hard-won over many years, it takes courage and persistence, it is a deep thing. And people are drawn to it, but it is what we are all, in our own ways, moving towards, and away from the limiting beliefs and certainties, given apparent substance by their collective acceptance, that form the psychic infrastructure of large societies.