Field Note #15 - Following Wisdom

Over the years of mentoring shamanic practitioners, I have witnessed hundreds of accounts of journeys, encounters with Nature, visions, messages and experiences of connection.

And very early on, I began having moments that would make me pause.

I would be deeply moved by the extraordinary wisdom coming through the student practitioners.

Often it felt as though I were listening to an enlightened master speaking through the practitioner before me. The words might be simple, but there was a clarity and beauty within them that was unmistakable.

I witnessed this again and again.  Until, I began to understand something:

This is a human capacity. 

We have access to extraordinary wisdom.

So over the years, the question that interested me became less about how we access it.

Can I receive guidance?

Can I see?

Can I hear?

Can I connect with Nature or the unseen?

And more about:

What happens after the wisdom comes through? 

Can we embody it?

Can we bring it forth into the way we actually live?

Through years of mentoring—and through more than thirty years of working with bodies and movement—I have noticed certain states that can get in the way of this.

They aren't necessarily separate from one another. In fact, they often seem to be deeply interrelated.

But these are five that I have encountered again and again.

Ego and Hierarchy

When I speak about ego here, I am speaking particularly about the hierarchy we can create around these experiences.

I can see. 

I can hear. 

I receive messages. 

I have access to something other people don't. 

And it can move in the other direction as well.

I can't see. 

I don't receive messages. 

I'm not as gifted as someone else. 

Better than. Worse than. More special. Less special.

The ability itself becomes part of how we position ourselves in relationship to others.

And then we can become stuck there—defending it, doubting it, proving it, comparing ourselves through it.

Rather than allowing what we experience to continue moving through us, we begin building an identity around the fact that we experience it at all.

Complexity

Another pattern I have witnessed is the idea that complexity is somehow better.

We can become fascinated with increasingly complex ways of understanding existence, our healing, our purpose, our spiritual lives.

And yet some of the deepest wisdom can be incredibly simple.

I might be connecting with a tree and receive something very simple.

A few words. An image. A feeling.

But in that moment, what comes can be vast.

It can be completely dialed into the question I am holding or what I need in that particular moment.

If I dismiss it because it seems too simple, I can miss everything that was there.

And then I am off again.

The next journey.

The next plant medicine.

The next healing.

The next experience.

Always looking for something more, something deeper, something more complex.

And perhaps missing the pure wisdom that was already moving through life.

Linear Time

Our relationship with time comes into this as well.

I have spoken about this more deeply in previous Field Notes, so I don't go as far into it here.

But in journey states and other expanded experiences, we may experience time very differently.

Past, present and future don't necessarily seem so separate. Relationships and connections can appear across time in ways that don't fit neatly into a straight line.

And then we return to ordinary life and place everything back into a linear understanding of time.

This happened.

Then this happened.

Now I am here.

This is what my past means about who I am now.

What happens to some of what we perceived in that more open state when we return to seeing time only this way?

The Permanence of Form

This leads into something closely related: our belief in the permanence of form.

In a journey state, an open state, we may experience extraordinary fluidity.

We can see interrelationships. Things move and transform. One thing becomes another. Alchemical shifts occur. Something that seemed impossible a moment before can reorganize completely.

And then we come back into ordinary life and say:

This is just the way I am. 

This is just the way it is. 

My body is like this. 

This situation is like this. 

Everything becomes solid again.

And yet matter itself is not the static, solid thing it appears to be in our everyday experience. At the physical level, what seems solid is dynamic and continually interacting.

So I find this an interesting place of inquiry.

We can experience ourselves as fluid and interconnected in one state and then return to living as though our forms, our bodies, our identities and our circumstances are fixed.

What happens if we allow fluidity to remain?

Embodiment

And then there is the body.

I have spent more than thirty years working with bodies and movement, and this is where my own observations about embodiment come strongly into this conversation.

Embodiment has become something of a buzzword.

And yet I sometimes find that even when we are talking about embodiment, we take the body out of it. 

We can speak about embodied wisdom, embodied spirituality, embodied healing.

But where is your heart?

Not where do you know your heart is because you learned it from a book.

Can you actually find it within yourself?

Where is your diaphragm?

What is it like to experience it from within?

Where are your hip joints?

Can you feel where they are?

Can you move within them?

Can you connect with them?

Over many years, I have worked with people whose professions and practices are deeply focused on the body—movement teachers, coaches, dancers, yoga practitioners, bodyworkers, even doctors and therapists —and I have often been surprised by how little internal body awareness may actually be present.

There can be tremendous knowledge about the body without necessarily having a living experience of the body from within.

And this matters to me because of where we began.

If we are interested in bringing forth this wisdom that we have access to, then the instrument of expression—the body itself—needs addressing.

This extraordinary wisdom can come through us.

I have witnessed it too many times to doubt the beauty of that human capacity.

But then what?

Can it move through the way we speak?

The way we move?

The way we relate?

The choices we make?

The way we meet our own bodies and the world around us?

Can something we have experienced in a journey, in Nature, in meditation, in a dream, or in another state of awareness become more than an experience we once had?

Can we walk it forth into our lives? 

Perhaps this is where the exploration of embodiment really begins.

Not simply with what we can access.

But with what we are able to bring forth.