The Spaciousness of Being, the Activation of Purpose

Posted on August 22, 2020 by admin

(I’m working on my next post but Kate passed this onto me and it is so good I want to pass it along to you as well. I have not heard of Philip before, but it is always a delight to meet a fellow somanaut and voice of Collective Awakening with a unique and universal perspective. Thank you Philip!!)

By Philip Shepherd (from his blog)

We are in the midst of an extraordinary moment in history – witnesses to and participants in a global unravelling. It is a potent storm fuelled by three converging vectors: the untold damage human activity is inflicting on nature; the disruptive virus that nature is inflicting on human activity; and the ideas of power, inequality and entitlement, ossified within human institutions, that are inflicting pain on fellow humans.

There is no telling when this storm will pass, or how it will alter our world. One thing seems certain to me, though: it’s never been more important to ground yourself in being and feel yourself aligned with and carried forward by your deepest purpose. This short essay reflects on the nature of those challenges.

Your body takes up space in the world. Everyone’s does. But think about it for a moment: the space your body occupies is not an encroachment on the world’s space, or an intrusion into it. Nor does it represent some kind of annexation, wherein your body claims ownership over that space and holds it separate from the world. The space your body takes up belongs to the world as much as it belongs to you. The world courses unstoppably through it. That happens in the form of light, sound, gravity, electromagnetic waves and particle streams, of course. But also with every breath you take, with every morsel you eat, with every tear you shed, parts of you are turning into the world and parts of the world are turning into you. So the space occupied by your body is not where you hoard the self, but where your self and the world converge in a living partnership. There is no ‘me’ apart from that partnership. That partnership is the process of your being. It is the fundamental nature of your reality.

Your life is carried forward by that partnership for all the days you spend on this earth. Your existence depends on it: you cannot dissolve the partnership without dissolving your life. What you can do, though – and what we all tend to do – is to grow forgetful of it. Even as the partnership continues to sustain us, our awareness of the body tends to dim as we learn to contract our thinking more and more into our heads. We leave the spaciousness of being and hem ourselves into the consolidations of doing. We come to observe the living convergence of self and world through the static prism of idea, and eventually we stop feeling it. Which means we stop feeling our reality.

The values and hierarchies of our culture encourage that retreat from our natural spaciousness. We are told to uphold a fiction of the body as a mechanical thing that operates in a mechanical universe, and to fabricate a sense of self that stands aloof from all partnership. But there’s more to our culture’s message than mere encouragement. I think our culture is so attached to its fantasies of independence, domination and control that it looks upon the spaciousness of being as though it were a death threat – because once you feel the spaciousness within your body in its continuity with the spaciousness of the wide world and beyond, the self-important ego suffers an existential shock, and can tailspin into confusion and disorientation. Your cherished little concretized certainties are suddenly awash in a tidal wave of mystery.

The spaciousness of being hums with every possibility. Every consequence of past events ripples untraceably through it as though through a fathomless ocean, as does the potential for every event that is to come. Like the quantum vacuum, the spaciousness of being is the empty nothing out of which everything is birthed. And even as the spaciousness of being contains your body, your body contains it. All that lives through it lives also through you.

The body can recover its natural spaciousness when it empties of expectation and comes fully to rest in the present. But that process of emptying directly contradicts our cultural directive to secure the self within a fortified boundary. So let’s look at that emptying. To allow your body to truly come to rest on the earth and in the present, you need to find ways of opening it to the present and the earth. And that undertaking will necessarily draw you into a process of deep undoing. It requires a dismantling of the body’s inner barricades and divisions: bringing voice back to the silenced shadows within its flesh; dissolving its congested anxieties; softening any resistance you might have to belonging to something larger than yourself; and disarming the insensate patterns held in the body that fortify you against uncertainty. As all those frozen energies yield and thaw and harmonize, they open within the body a cavern that is spacious enough to receive the world – a cavern that welcomes the empty nothing out of which everything is birthed. The currents of the transforming present course through that cavern within, even as they flow through the spaciousness of the world around you.

The spaciousness of your being is like the space within a bell – it is what enables you to attune to the world. Such attunement is very different from sitting in your head and noticing the world ‘out there’. Attunement enables the world to be also felt ‘in here’ – in the empty resonance of your being. It allows you to come home to the fundamental reality of your life: feeling ‘your’ space as a continuity of the world’s; feeling your life as a continuity of the world’s. Moreover, as you attune to the living world that holds you, you cannot but awaken to the intimacy of your partnership with it. That partnership summons you to come and play and give the whole of your being to help ease and deepen the harmony in which you live. And you’ll find that the service or task to which you are summoned is one that directly activates the gifts of your deepest nature. By surrendering to what the world is calling from you, then – by allowing your being to be so profoundly activated – you also surrender to the flowering of your fullest humanity.

Feeling your life carried forward by that partnership relies on your ability to sensitize the body’s spaciousness to the spaciousness of being to which it belongs. But there is a compelling reason we tend to consolidate within ourselves and barricade the door against our fundamental nature. The spaciousness of being is something you can join, you can be carried by, you can dance with – but it is not something you can control. And in a culture that obsessively asserts agendas of control over the natural harmony of the world, that partnership looks scary. Control is what we trust. Harmony, a property of the whole, is way beyond control. You can find guidance in the world’s harmony, but you will never dominate it. Furthermore, if you accept that guidance and undertake the work it is calling you to, it will not offer you a map, a clear destination, or any assurance of success. All it can guarantee is that by giving your life to what the world is summoning you to, the whole of your being will come alive, and your purpose will be illuminated by being lived.

A body trapped in its own consolidations is like a singing bowl filled with sand: it cannot ring to the world around it. When you cannot yield to the spaciousness of being and attune to the world, there can be no felt partnership. There can be no palpable guidance. You are immunized against the juicy exhilaration and wonder of feeling yourself being organized by the mindful whole. What you are left with instead is your aloneness, and the endless, stale task of organizing yourself.

It seems our culture has made a choice: we would rather feel ourselves alone in the world than to feel ourselves not in control of it. By siding with the fantasy of control, we turn our backs on the experience of feeling the whole moving and speaking through us. We miss the grace and wonder of life itself. On the other hand, once you identify a choice that your culture has made on your behalf, you are free to begin forging a new one.

Healing Personal and Collective Trauma

Posted on August 1, 2020 by admin

NASCAR drivers Kyle Busch, left, and Corey LaJoie, right, join other drivers and crews as they push the car of Bubba Wallace to the front of the field prior to the start of the NASCAR Cup Series auto race at the Talladega Superspeedway.John Bazemore/Associated Press

Not sure how many of my readers follow NASCAR. It’s usually not on my radar either, but this photo taken in early June at the beginning of a race at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama captures an extraordinary moment in American history that brings tears to my eyes every time I fully take in its significance. The car belongs to Bubba Wallace, the only full time Black driver on the stock car circuit. It is being guided to its position at the start of the race by every single driver in the race, and every single member of their support teams, all choosing to make a unified stand about love and inclusion.

A few weeks previous to the race, Bubba, with the support of all the other White drivers, asked NASCAR to ban the display of the Confederate flag at all races and, amazingly enough, NASCAR officials did just that. This is not going over well with many of the predominantly southern White male fans, and Sunday evening, it appeared that someone had left a noose in the garage of Bubbas racing team. The response, as shown above, was immediate, clear and unified. We (NASCAR) stand for love and inclusion and against hatred and division. (It was later clarified by the F.B.I. that it was a garage door pull fashioned as a noose and had been there for several months.)

The healing of collective trauma cannot truly begin without a deep acknowledgement of its reality. And it is the nature of trauma, at its root, to remain hidden, repressed and unseen. The symptoms and after effects may be recognized cognitively, but until we can begin to feel the visceral reality of the violence. Collectively, trauma healing requires a group acknowlegement, or witnessing the trauma and the a group ritual or action directed specifically toward healing the wound. The Nascar act of love, support and acknowledgement was so powerful for me because it was a real, embodied action of collective healing.

It is now early August. We have a long long way to go in healing. The deeply embedded trauma that White supremacy has inflicted upon the African American people, as well as the Native American people, has been accumulating for over five centuries. It continues in the present as the collective fears of a certain percentage of White people have added Hispanic and Muslim people to the crosshairs of the fear and anger. The fact that we have a president who amplifies these fears, and in an election year is doubling down on his ignorance, is both terrifying and heartbreaking. But is is the nature of unconsciousness to perpetuate patterns of behavior until they are brought to the conscious level for reflection, recognition and the awakening oof sufficient motivation to change.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020. For whatever reason, his death was the one that finally broke through the ignorance and denial of collective White America to the depth and intensity of the traumas Black Americans live with on a day to day basis. Certainly not all of White America is awakening, but a large enough percentage of people in power to begin a shift. Corporations follow the money, so I am suspicious of the underlying motives of some of their statements, but, none the less, we are seeing the beginning of a major, major shift in American society, and one that is ripploing around the planet.

It is my hope that this shift will be driven from the spiritual foundation of “Wholeness”, Inter-being, Love, and fierce Compassion. It is the only hope for long lasting and meaningful change, because there is also a much larger collective trauma that also needs to be acknowledged; the trauma inflicted onto Mother Earth by all humans. We need to expand time, envision 10 generations into the future, and ask ourselves; What are we offering those generations to come? We have been given one of the most prolific, fecund planets in the galaxy and are systematically destroying the very conditions that allow life to flourish. As my mentor Thomas Berry once stated, ‘modern humans have macrophase power and microphase intelligence.”

It is easy to fall into hopelessness and despair when confronting the magnitude of our challenges, unless we have a spiritual practice that can orient and balance us. Each of us has a ‘soul role’ to play. We have incarnated into this moment with a set of skills, a certain level of vitality, lessons to learn, and a place in the center of the living breathing energy field of Mother Earth, the Solar System and the Milky Way. A practice helps us refine our skills, maintain our vitality, study and learn from our lessons, and participate in the dance. We need to cultivate multiple resources to facilitate any type of healing and the beginning of collective healing is our own personal journey of healing.

Unconscious trauma presents a fragmented perspective on reality. Thomas Huebl describes this as though looking through broken glass. Thomas, in his own unique way, goes on to note that our brains then ‘photoshop’ the fragments away. It fills in the blank regions so we may ‘appear’ to have a coherent view and function in society. But the information coming in to us from the world is actually quite fragmented and thus our ability to respond to the world is limited. As Thomas says, our ‘response-ability’, our ability to respond to the moment, is compromised and this is true both individually and collectively.

Our memory and cognitive constellations tend to determine our perceptions and actions. If we are not in true resonance with the world moment to moment, our fall back will be to refer to our beliefs, concepts and memories and call these ‘reality’. These beliefs and concepts, more often that not, have been passed down by our parents, grandparents and teachers, and society as a whole. Because they, and we, were born into a world with pre-existing personal, ancestral and collective traumas, we usually do not see the trauma. It is ‘just the way things are, and always have been. White supremacy is the root of the collective trauma of our time.

It is the nature of modern culture that athletes and entertainers have the largest and loudest platform to speak to the general public. That also gives them a lot of power. ( Professional and college athletics currently generate upwards of eighty billion dollars of revenue every year!) The murder of George Floyd was the tipping point that woke up a sufficient number of White athletes and coaches so that they can begin to hear the stories their Black teammates are telling. On the collegiate side, money more than morals drives the bus, but none-the-less, the voices the Black Americans are finally being heard and acknowledged by White American and a social momentum of deep seated change has begun.

The burden of systemic racism and White supremacy, inflicted by the European cultures onto the Black and Native populations going back to the time of Columbus, is being recognized as an acute personal and cultural trauma that White people must acknowledge, feel and address through action. Hispanic and Muslim communities also have been recipients of White ignorance and rage. Jews have been recipients of ignorance and rage for centuries. How to navigate the fullness of the damage done to multiple ethnic groups, across multiple generations, remains to be seen. That NASCAR, the most White and most ‘southern’ of our national sports, chose to make a statement, is a sign of hope. However, symbolic gestures can only be the beginning if true healing and transformation of society is to take place. The energy of protests have to become transformed into policy and symbolism has to be transformed into tackling extremely challenging unconsciously entrenched habits of White supremacy. Bandages are of no use when radical cultural surgery is needed. This will not be easy, simple or quick.

The voices of those who have been victimized by the inherent White supremacy embedded in the fabric of American society are being finally heard. As part of my own personal healing I have been reading and re-reading Kevin Powell: (The Education of Kevin Powell) and (My Mother, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and the last stand of The Angry White Man): and Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), heart opening descriptions of how de-humanizing and traumatizing growing up an African American Male can be; how that burden often is then inflicted onto women and each other; and how painful the path of healing can be.

Also needing to be heard are the voices of those who have on the front lines of racism for decades and who can speak from well earned wisdom. Civil Rights icon John Lewis wrote this a few days before he died. Another wonderful example is Ruth King’s Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out. Also, Buddhist teacher Larry Ward, as expressed in this blog post on The Lotus Institute web site. Or this Op-ed from Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Boston Globe writers Renee Graham and Jenee Osterheldt are two more voices of Black women who keep me paying attention. Social change is challenging at any level and our current situation has layers and levels of trauma that will require years of diligent and relentless effort. Keep reading, keep listening. The more voices in the choir, the more powerful the music.

The collective cultural healing we desperately need can only happen when all ethnic groups can express and be respected for their unique perspectives, traditions and talents, while at the same time discovering in each other the essential common ground of wholeness and unity. Even in individuals, trauma cannot be healed individually. The healing of trauma requires an ‘other’, to listen to the stories, feel, embody and validate the experience and then link energetically with the speaker in wholeness. I hear your pain, I feel your pain, I take it into the depths of my cells, and join you in the communal healing of the heart.

Working with my pre-natal PTSD is very different from working with the challenges of my new hip joint. Working with the quirkiness of the hip doesn’t trigger any deep and hidden emotional trauma. No shortage of frustration, but that is quite different, very obvious and relatively easy to manage. The trauma of PTSD awakens terror and this needs to be handled with care and love.

The complex emotional charge of stored trauma and its effect on the body’s nervous system requires a much more nuanced approach. This is equally valid in the collective field as well as the individual’s energy field. With trauma, there is embedded in the field a powerful, non-verbal sense of chaos; of having no control of the situation, of being totally disconnected from the present moment. This is the nature of unresolved trauma. Because it has been repressed, and it takes a lot of energy to do so, it is like a pressure cooker slowly moving toward explosion.

The analogy to the looting and rioting is very relevant. As Kareem Abdul Jabbar mentioned above, when an intense collective trauma has been accumulating for generations, eruptions of violence cannot possibly be surprising. What is amazing is that there is not more outbreaks of violence. Much of the inner city and gang related violence stems from this collective generational trauma.

In an embodied approach to trauma therapy such as Somatic Experiencing, the mature adult/therapist helps the client discover their own pressure valve and guides them in learning how to safely and slowly discharge the pent up fear/anger/energy. This may take months or years to do safely. Doing this collectively is part of the new level of healing of our time. Spiritual teacher Thomas Huebl is one of the planet’s leading guides in this realm and I highly recommend listening to him or working with him.

Hearing the stories and opening our hearts to the intense suffering of others may help us dive into our own darker dimensions. There is a not so subtle hint in the ‘Apostles Creed’ the prayer I learned as a child growing up in the Catholic Church. Upon his death and before ‘ascending into heaven’, Jesus ‘descendit ad inferna‘, he descended into hell. To become ‘One with God’, aka Enlightened, aka realize ‘True Nature’, we must descend into the inferno, like Dante in the Divine Comedy, to truly see the depths of our trauma and begin the healing. Dante had guides, the Roman poet Virgil and Beatrice. We need guides. We need our angels. And we need to be very diligent in our practice of coming back to the Stillness where True Nature reveals Itself as our ultimate refuge and ultimate source of healing.

(PS: a personal note)

Apologies for the delay. It has been almost 4 months since my last post. The cancer treatments, Covid-19, Black Lives Matter and my ‘new hip’ have sucked the energy out of me and slowed me way down. Very little energy for anything but listening and healing. I’ve been trying to finish this post for two months now, so it is a bit choppy.But I did not want to wait any longer

But I am slowly re-emerging! I will be done with the cancer meds by mid September. (By all indications the cancer should be gone, but there are no guarantees.) I’m back to swimming every day, rebuilding strength, trying to write, considering some Zoom classes, and my son Sean and I are collaborating on a series of podcasts to discuss the evolutionary dimensions of our present moment. I’ll keep you posted on that.

Also much thanks to all who reached out to me for my surgery and birthday. George Floyd was murdered on May 25 and my surgery was May 26. I spent much of my 70th birthday June 1 oscillating between deep grief and deep joy. Great for my heart opening, but exhausting.

Stay safe, stay awake, keep loving, keep practicing…

Holiday Greetings

Posted on December 24, 2019 by admin

Happy Solstice, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year.

As we flow along with the transition from waning yang to maximum yin and then yin transforming to new born yang, the time is ripe for deep introspection and dissolving into Presence. As such, I offer you some holiday gifts for your practice in the form of some wisdom from three of my favorite teachers, Adyashanti, Jeffrey Yuen and Frank Ostaseski.

We begin with Adyanshanti’s clear and concise description of what he calls True meditation. By the way, as I discussed in the previous post, I find this process very difficult. I have become quite seduced by the subtle levels of form, with all the insights and traumas that arise with there. This is a universal story, as the experiences of Buddha and Jesus have pointed out. The egoic structures cannot survive in Timeless Presence, so they will become more and more subtle in their ways of preventing us from dropping into our True Nature.

For me, refined focal attention (samadhi) in the energy fields of the body has become places of egoic stuckness. The pleasurable ones are the infinite nuances of the energy patterns. I can follow them forever and never arrive in stillness. My yang attentional field wants to keep ‘doing’. I am, very slowly, learning to have a yin attentional field, where my attention moves to a place in the body, and then I ‘get out of the way’ and allow the energy to do its own thing. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, my somatic guru is helping me with this. And then, with some grace, my attention can dissolve into Presence.

The unpleasant places of stuckness are the granthis mentioned in the previous post. Here, fear and armoring against the fear create a loop on tightening and constriction. As with the fun stuff, maintaining a ‘yin’ attentional field is the key to help resolve/dissolve these energetic habits. Occasionally, True Nature, drashtuh svarupe, appears from behind the attachments as open, spacious, effortless resting and knowing. I find that opening to spaciousness is helpful, but this is still operating in the world of form. And Presence is open to everything, including stuckness, so ultimately I just laugh at my own foolishness. Adya offers similar advice, in his own unique and simple way.

“True meditation has no direction or goal. It is pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer. All methods aiming at achieving a certain state of mind are limited, impermanent, and conditioned. Fascination with states leads only to bondage and dependency. True meditation is abidance as primordial awareness.

True meditation appears in consciousness spontaneously when awareness is not being manipulated or controlled. When you first start to meditate, you notice that attention is often being held captive by focus on some object: on thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, memories, sounds, etc. This is because the mind is conditioned to focus and contract upon objects. Then the mind compulsively interprets and tries to control what it is aware of (the object) in a mechanical and distorted way. It begins to draw conclusions and make assumptions according to past conditioning.

In true meditation all objects (thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, etc.) are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to focus on, manipulate, control, or suppress any object of awareness. In true meditation the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness is the source in which all objects arise and subside.

As you gently relax into awareness, into listening, the mind’s compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Silence of being will come more clearly into consciousness as a welcoming to rest and abide. An attitude of open receptivity, free of any goal or anticipation, will facilitate the presence of silence and stillness to be revealed as your natural condition.

As you rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive control, contractions, and identifications. Awareness naturally returns to its non-state of absolute unmanifest potential, the silent abyss beyond all knowing.

SOME COMMON QUESTIONS ABOUT MEDITATION

Q. It seems that the central instruction in True Meditation is simply to abide as silent, still awareness. However, I often find that I am caught in my mind. Is it OK to use a more directed meditation like following my breath, so that I have something to focus on that will help me to not get lost in my mind?

A. It is perfectly OK to use a more directed technique such as following your breath, or using a simple mantra or centering prayer, if you find that it helps you to not get lost in thought. But always be inclined toward less and less technique. Make time during each meditation period to simply rest as silent, still awareness. True Meditation is progressively letting go of the meditator without getting lost in thought.

Q. What should I do if an old painful memory arises during meditation?

A. Simply allow it to arise without resisting it or indulging in analyzing, judging, or denying it.

Q. When I meditate I sometimes experience a lot of fear. Sometimes it overwhelms me and I don’t know what to do.

A. It is useful when experiencing fear in meditation to anchor your attention in something very grounding, such as your breath or even the bottoms of your feet. But don’t fight against the fear because this will only increase it. Imagine that you are the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, or Christ in the desert, remaining perfectly still and unmoved by the body-mind’s nightmare. It may feel very real but it is really nothing more than a convincing illusion.

Q. What should I do when I get an insight or sudden understanding of a situation during meditation?

A. Simply receive what is given with gratitude, without holding onto anything. Trust that it will still be there when you need it.

Q. I find that my mind is spontaneously forming images, almost like a waking dream. Some of them I like, while others are just random and annoying. What should I do?

A. Focus attention on your breathing down in your belly. This will help you to not get lost in the images of the mind. Hold the simple intention to rest in the imageless, silent source prior to all images, thoughts, and ideas.”

The following interview with Jeffrey comes from the website of the Academy of Classical Chinese Medicine, in Ireland, a great resource for Jeffrey’s wisdom. In this Q and A, he is describing why he is going to be teaching a program on Shamanism. Many of his observations are almost word for word parallels to Adyashantis comments on his own approach to spiritual healing he offered in a recent 5 day silent retreat attended by Kate and Sean. As we have been focusing on Daoist imagery in our classes, hopefully we can begin to see that our somatic yoga prectice can be personal shamanic journeys for our own healing. I’ve put in bold face type some of the key principles Jeffrey mentions.

Q. Could you begin by giving us the background to this class, and why you decided to teach it?

“I have to say that it was not something I had intended to do. What I was planning to do this past year was to teach one of my normal one-year programme classes on healing with stones and things like that. The previous year we did a one-year programme on classical Chinese herbal medicine, and I touched on shamanism and herbal medicine. A lot of the students were really thrilled with that segment of the class and wanted me to continue teaching it – but I was somewhat ambivalent because I didn’t know how seriously people would be taking it.

“If you’re going to teach a class like this, you’re going to do exercises with the students, and a lot of those exercises really involve altering one’s state of consciousness. And there are a lot of ramifications when you change the reality of how you’re seeing the world, and yourself. Without proper grounding you can get into a lot of trouble. So I thought, well, maybe I’ll do that in the future. And I was set on teaching a class on healing with stones. But in a dream, it was told to me that I should teach this particular class.”

Q. When you say a dream, Jeffrey, do you mean literally a dream?

“Yes, in a dream an older gentleman came and told me I should teach this class. And so I made the decision.”

Q. Can you explain what you mean by shamanism?

“Shamanism, in my opinion, is the root of both religion and medicine. It’s inseparable. Both religion and medicine are supposed to offer some sense of salvation, or redemption – be it of the physical body, be it of the soul. If we look at the historical figures within Daoism and early Chinese medicine, a lot of these were shamans. Many are depicted wearing what we would consider a shamanistic outfit. They might be wearing feathers around their bodies. They might be wearing a mask – which would symbolise the idea that they’re becoming someone different.

“In Daoism the early connections were always with nature. These early shamans took time to be in silence, in stillness, which awoke them to another level of reality. At 20 years of age the founder of my Daoist tradition – her name is Lady Wei – would go into the woods and collect plants. Not because she was being a naturalist, but because she was being at one with the plants. And the plants that she collected became the path to healing for her.

“When you get to that level of serenity, the plant spirits – or what they call ‘plant songs’ – create an intimate connection with the person. It’s almost like the plant functions based on its interaction with the healer, rather than on a more objective list of classifications where you say, ‘Well, this is what that plant does’. Once you become intimate with the plant it’s almost like the spirit of the plant talks to you – and it then becomes part of who you are. So that plant works for you because it’s being activated, or invoked, by who you are.”

Q. So shamanism always involves connection with the spirit world, in one form or another?

“I would say there are many levels by which one might practice shamanism. People work at the level they’re most comfortable with, or the level that their own cultivation has evolved into. There are a bunch of students in my class in New York who who already consider themselves to be shamans. They’ve undergone training in the Amazon, in Peru; there’s one person who’s an African shaman and there are a number of Native American shamans.

“In the Daoist tradition which I belong to, the Shang Qing school, we do a lot of meditation. In the course of that meditation we enter into what I guess, in the West, you would call ‘an altered state of consciousness’. We call it ‘entering into another reality’. And in that reality you get to learn from those things that you make contact with. You basically allow your consciousness to go into different realms, and at the same time you become another consciousness. You don’t try to control anything, you try to be open to everything. There’s a sense in which you lose who you are when you’re in that meditative state – and then you return back to how you basically believe you ‘are’. It’s almost like schizophrenia.”

Q. Which is why you have to be so well grounded in your own reality to begin with?

“Right. So you can see why I was ambivalent about wanting to teach something like that to a group of students – a lot of whom I don’t know individually. At the beginning we did a lot of grounding exercises, and I tried to emphasise that when you go into one of these states there’s a lot of things you need to do to return to physical reality- such as put your attention to parts of your body. So your body becomes like a grounding tool which helps you to stay anchored.”

Q. For you, Jeffrey, is the shamanistic approach an important tool in a healer’s repertoire?

“I think it’s probably the most important tool. About six years ago I went into semi-retirement. I didn’t want to practice Chinese medicine for a period of time, and it was because I wanted to take time to contemplate the essence of healing. To me, that was not what I was practicing. There was something I believed was still missing, in terms of working with individuals to seek healing based on the individual, rather than just giving herbs or giving acupuncture or other healing modalities. A lot of it was really asking, what is the underlying spirit of healing? And taking time to contemplate and reflect on that. And I can’t say I’ve found the answer! But I have definitely come to a greater realization of what it is that I believe needs to occur in the process of healing – and that is, that the consciousness that brings on disease cannot be the consciousness that brings on healing.”

Q. This is something you’ve spoken about before, Jeffrey: could you sum up why you feel it’s so important?

“I believe that to heal a person has to shift their consciousness.

In Western medicine there’s this sense of objectivity – of not allowing the transference of the patient into the clinician, and vice versa. But I believe that’s not appropriate. I believe that I have to be in the consciousness of my patient so that I can alter that consciousness, and then bring that consciousness back to the patient to see if they can alter it. So it was really for me to become more aware of how my patients were seeing themselves – almost like a form of therapy. I had to take ownership of their consciousness, to see how they would think in various circumstances. And maybe give them different ways of looking at it, or seeing it, in order to provoke them to change their perception.”

Q. As you’ve said, however, entering into an altered state of consciousness can be dangerous – if it’s done without sufficient preparation and grounding. What are the potential dangers of a shamanistic approach, and can you give some examples of the grounding exercises you used with your students?

“Well, the dangers might involve you summoning up or generating images – or, for lack of a better word, entities – that potentially can be harmful to yourself. If you start meditation and you believe in, say, ghosts, then you may enter a dimension where there are ghosts. Because if I say ‘I’m afraid of ghosts’, the hair on the back of my neck starts to rise, and the fear can build into a state of panic. That state of panic is going to sabotage your ability to go further.

“That’s why one of the early lectures that we had on the shamanism course was all about how not to be afraid of death and dying. The most that anything can do to you is to cause you to die – and if you’re not afraid of death and dying, then you’ve overcome one obstacle to shamanism already. That’s why, in some religious traditions, people sometimes meditate in cemeteries or get buried underneath the ground. They’re doing things to stimulate fear. The ultimate fear is the fear of annihilation – that you’ll no longer be who you are. So if you can overcome that fear in a mental, emotional and ultimately physical way, that’s one of the grounding techniques.

“One of the things the students had to do was learn to be comfortable in total darkness. When I was young, I grew up in New York city – so my meditation room was the closet. I would be locked up in the closet, and it would be totally dark! Some people would find that really uncomfortable. But the idea is that in total darkness you can generate light. The Daoist master Chuang Tzu writes that with day comes night, with life comes death. Night returns to day and death returns to life. The idea is to provide a beacon of light, to provide guidance to those who are stuck in that state of consciousness. Because if a healer is stuck there, then they can’t really offer their patient much resolution – outside the comfort of compassion. That’s very important. But it may not just be enough for healing to take place.”

Q. To sum up, then, a shamanistic approach to healing is not really about externals – feathers, masks and so on – but has more to do with internal change?

“The ultimate thing to realise is that there are no tools in shamanism. Although people use feathers, or they use chanting, or drumming, those are just crutches – just as in healing we use herbs and needles and all of that. But the healing comes from within. What we do is, basically, we are touching the person with our spirit. Anyone who is a healer in the truest sense just heals with their presence. We can feel that energy, and if we’re receptive to it it opens us up to the endless wonder of human possibility.”

I met Frank Ostaseski last November at a ‘Love, Death and Dying’ workshop at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, and wrote about it here. Frank is one of the most open, clear and heart centered people I have ever met. So there was with shock and sadness when I heard that he had suffered a major stroke last summer, and then a series of smaller ones afterward. I have been following his healing story through a blog series posted by his wife. Last week, he made his first public appearance at the end of major conference on end of life care sponsored by EndWell. A video was posted by his wife, Vanda, and can be seen by clicking on this link. It is quite powerful and extraordinary to hear his story about how he is being present to what life is giving him.