Category: Mindset

This will make it 3 of 3 and I know in writing this I am also leaving out  a whole lot that could be included. That’s the nature of this creative project, it always involves loss. You give it all  and there are bound to be mistakes, ways I could have said it better. 

One of the most important lessons I learn from my quest is to appreciate water.  In my every day, it is too easy to take for granted. On the 8th day I am given a 1.5 L  bottle of cold water. Eight days behind me without a drop except for the medicine tea on day 5 but water is different.  The satisfaction arrives as it touches my lips. My state is instantly changed, water gives me the feeling of life.  My inner spring fills,  I think how a plant must feel after a dry season.  I  don’t need much of anything, I feel that in my being. It’s enough right now, I am enough right now. Life happening and thank goodness water is part of it.

The water prayer in the  West (on the medicine wheel)  is about surrender and it reaches into the last 4 days of integration. I am visited twice  by the support team on day 8  for the water prayer and again on day 10 which takes me through to the 13th day, where the quester is ‘harvested’. I think anyone who completed a quest will wholeheartedly agree that this last day is a an emotional one. The feeling that overcomes me when I see my support walk towards me for the last time is a mixed bag, relief, joy, even sadness at the finality of it.  

Back to the story. I thought I  may be in for some smooth sailing after the water days. They were anything but and perhaps the most challenging of all. This time was characterised by incredibly vivid dreamscape, bearing in  mind that lucid dreaming is now a very normal part of my sleep. I climb up a notch or two in my dreamtime leading me to this experience I am calling ‘the deeper dream’.

It is the dream that invites me to let go of all control and meet my fear in a very real way.  It’s not the kind of experience one can get ready for. The preparation I needed was these past days and the building of trust in the ground beneath me.  Intellectually, I know about my deeper fear. A central theme is not counting for something or not being seen or included. Going there though is a different story.

This is how it went – I am plunged into my dream to  visit a teacher of mine that I have worked with for many years. He himself taught and received many  a lesson in dreamtime. In the dream he delivers a clean and swift blow to my ego.  A group of students are sitting around him. He captures our imaginations as he always does with wild stories and all the charisma emanating from his shaman heart. My heart is beating so loud it could explode with excitement. It feels like this is what my life was made for. I know  he is going somewhere soon.  I remember he said something about it but the details aren’t clear. I also know it could happen any moment so I must be ready.

There is a part of me in the background that is also secretly waiting for a special invitation, something that acknowledges our bond and sets me apart from everyone else. It never comes.  Making matters worse, I am mid sharing something in the circle that feels important to me. It’s not that he is not listening, rather his attention is on something much bigger. My little story appears to be insignificant in the moment we are in. He does not give it any attention whatsoever. I don’t come close to finishing. I am ignored.

In what feels like a flash he stands up and announces he is going on a special assignment. Being the one he is, it’s the kind of once in a lifetime project brimming with meaning and purpose. Just the kind of thing that appeals to my need for significance. Moments like these feel like they carry the antidote for everything in  me that feels void of  meaning.  There is nothing else I would rather do. This is my burning desire. Yet when the times comes, I am too slow and the three places are taken.  I don’t know how they go but they go. They may have left on a magic  carpet for all I know.

A void remains. I feel an emptiness I may have been avoiding for lifetimes.  Ignored, rejected, abandoned. Here I am in what feels like the worst that could happen.  My  heart is broken.

In the next moment I wake up, it still feels so real, my heart aches. I am certain that it happened.  I look around,  its early in the morning. The light is starting to break the night sky.  I see a leaf  connected to a branch.  I feel  a deep relief, it was just a dream.

The thought comes. I am that leaf, maybe I fall from  the tree but I never lose my belonging.  I come from the tree, I am always a part of the tree, no question. Even my deepest fear can never change that. At the most essential level  I am always apart of life and life takes me in. All that remains is thank you.

So much of my ideas around time revolve around doing things. This meeting or that activity measured in certain amounts of time. I put aside time to do things and then fill it with actions.  On vision  quest all those channels are removed.  My experience of time itself changes. Most of it is noise.  When I sit with myself for any extended time I see that clearly. Most of it is different kinds of noise, little of which matters or has much bearing on reality. But my attention is trained in a particular way so put me in social context and watch me run. I run myself as if I were in control, in the illusion of thinking I am the pilot.  Who am I kidding, I am little more control of myself than I am the weather.  The difference is it appears like I am and I have society behind me telling me that I have this thing called free will. That’s a topic for another conversation. Suffice  is  to say that I don’t see anything free about  my will as long as it’s at the whim of my conditioning. The freedom I find on  the mountain is precisely because of the constraints.  That intelligence moves me beyond my predictable patterning.

This part of my writing then I am calling –  grappling with my story.

The structure of the quest is broken into 4, 7, 9 and 13 days.  You complete one and move onto the next the following year.  The 13 day being the quest that integrates the entire process. You go through all previous quests and then add another 4 days on just to make sure you get it.  What is one getting? many possibilities but for me the most pressing, I need a lot less than I think I do. In fact needing nothing at all can produce the most ecstatic states.

The essential self is the ground of acceptance. Without it there is little hope for acceptance because the ego is very simple and predictable by nature. It either doesn’t wants or does. In either case, resistance is at the core of experience. Resistance to losing what I have or to having what I don’t want. In either case, the underlying tone is  discontent. Freud called it ‘normal misery’. I don’t think he is was far off. In this  mode of push and pull, I need an awful lot of control.  The quest is a way of ripping the band aid off.  Giving my ego very little of what it wants, all I need do is witness my own dismantling. 

This is what catalysed the journey of acceptance.  Up  the notch of discomfort,  take away the usual distraction and see what’s there.  How am I? this is where it gets fascinating because from the outside, there I am sitting there looking like probably not much happening.  From the inside, another reality all together. Thoughts like flies are my constant companion. They can be agonising,  calm, sometimes insightful, memories, imaginations and projections and whatever else. Thankfully mind  does quieten  in nature. 

….    Humility – day 1 to 4  – colour Red – element Fire – direction East

The first 4 days the prayer is for humility. I  have to accept the fragility of my body. I am dying slowly.   I feel the absence of water more than anything.  It is an incredibly physical journey on the level of bodily sensations. The dry fast puts me face on with my instincts.  There is a fight  in me. I feel like a wet cloth being rung out.   I wake up with the first light, a whole day ahead of me without water. The first day passes with relative ease and the second arrives before long. It’s a good feeling have these days behind me because I’m in it now.   On the 3rd and 4th day I experience waves of thirst but also longer  periods of  calm.

I am on my back a lot. Sometimes I find myself  in foetal position finding  solace in the holding.  Every posture has a cycle and I sense myself coming to the  end  of one and moving into the next.  One of my favourites is on my back with my legs up on  the side of a tree.  I feel so much support from the tree as the soles of  my feet find  a place on the bark. As if tree speaks through my feet, telling me I am a part of this nature. I  love this feeling of feet  connected to tree. Even better when the sun finds my body and warms me to my bones.

My days are spent in only a handful of different positions and there is some routine. The end of one leads into the beginning of the next. From my back I sit up. many people ask me if I meditate. I never meditate because the quest itself is one long meditation. There is no getting away from it, mind follows. Each moment is a choice of presence or distraction. I sit up,  not meditating, just sitting. Everything else is the same, mind heart body continue as they did  when I was on the ground. 

I enjoy the sitting but this too will give way into a new position like squatting.  Squatting too feels good for a time and then I am on my back again, this time I may stretch.  From there I walk around my space, or just stand for a while. And those more or less are my movements for the duration of the quest. I find a rhythm in them, there is a comfort in each one because they contain a beginning and end. Similar to a story, mind relaxes  in story, finds an orientation in story.

My thirst peaks on day 2 and into day 3, thereafter I am in a fasting state punctuated by longer periods where strangely the thirst disappears.  I am left needing nothing, a welcome feeling.   4 nights pass and I am visited by the support team around midday . It’s a welcome sight, knowing that relief is imminent.   I always have the thought that If I can do the first 4 days then I can do anything that follows.  But the painful emotions, the ones I spend my life avoiding can feel harder than not having water.

….    Will  – day 5 to 7  – colour Yellow – element Earth – direction South

 On day 5  to 7 the prayer is for will. These are  the prayers set within the tradition we work within. My will as it connects to universal will, remembering purpose beyond my personhood. What am I here for, what is mine to give.  My experience of this time is usually a clearing ground for whatever I pushed aside  that stands in the way of me listening to life. My fear, insecurity, worth, resistance to life come into view.

My palette is clean and my body is ready to receive every last drop of nourishment. I have to ration my fruit to about 2 pieces a day but before fruits, tea. This is the sacred sacrament of peyote. Just imagine how ripe you are after 4 days to receive this medicine. I  know little else that feels as healing to the body, mind, spirit. My cells feel like they are  in an ecstatic dance.  I am incredibly thirsty so take in more than half the 1.5 L allocated.

I am in heaven. It  is a strange transition to be on the other side of thirst. Will comes when  I relax, when I open to an intelligence beyond myself.  This new phase of the quest helps me with that by putting me in relationship with my condition in very real way.

Our conditions are complex, multifaceted and connected to past. Who knows how many generations back. I carry the stories of my ancestry.  They are alive in me,  both strengthening  and weakening forces. I am spun into the whirlwind of everything that I am and have been. The project at hand is coming to terms with the version of myself I have become.

I am cast back to a young boy. I know this boy but have not fully embraced him. I wish he had done it differently as I imagine who I would be now had he been able to stick it out at karate.

I feel angry with my dad because the story I am telling is that he let me quit. He should have shown me a way through rather than back away from challenging. He didn’t. That’s the father I had. There is more fight  in me.  Maybe I’m even angry at God, how could it have happened this way. Aren’t I supposed to be someone else.

I say acceptance runs deep because the things I need to accept are almost always rooted in the past. I have to feel what that boy felt, remember what his life was like. He needs compassion. It’s too easy to think that little guy should have done it differently.

The hard part about accepting the choice to quit was accepting all that came after that. Accepting  the implications to my life,  how this would shape me all the  way through to present day.

Only with hindsight’s view do I see the unfolding story.  When I take the perspective of that young boy, I see the truth of the choice  that he made. To him with everything he had at his disposal, the life that he had lived up until then all culminated in that being the best  he could do.  I find a way of softening with him, seeing him. Accepting him just as he is. I think of the pain of excluding him.

There is  no middle ground when it comes to acceptance. To accept life is to take it as it is, no argument. Those choices start the sketch of the character I will become, the major themes that will play out, the backdrop to my life.  Accepting the little boy in me and respecting his choice to quit puts me in relationship with all the versions of myself that would follow.  They too needed kindness and understanding. They all had their reasons. I must become even more  intimate with my story, finding a way  to love everything that has come before in my life, and the lives before me.

Accepting my life as it is then also accepting the inevitable archetypical journey that I step into by incarnating. From there novelty can emerge. What an opportunity in that, to do it differently in ways that count not only my own life but all that I am connected to.

Next and last post in this series – Blessing of water and dreaming the deeper dream

Credit to Joe Flemming for the feature image.

When I first heard about a vision quest, I was young. It sounded like a terrible idea even though I knew it was a respectable thing to do. I mostly feared that I wasn’t  made out of the right stuff to undertake such a journey. In the end, it took me 13 years to complete a series of 4 quests.  I had to redo my first and then took space between quests to build up  my will.

A vison quest really is a strange thing. Even now when I think about it just sounds too far out. You mean you just sit there and do nothing for all that time.   What on earth  could be the point.  There are no formal teachings,  no new knowledge,  no nothing at the end of it not even a certificate to validate your achievement.  Truly, the  ego doesn’t get much on this one. So what is the point and that’s something I’d like to answer  in a few parts. This then is part one, an introduction to my quest.

Firstly to say that I am so grateful for all the support I received not just from the bottom of the mountain but from friends all over that gave me the strength to  go do this. This is the essence of ubuntu, the deeply felt sense that I am because we are.  I exist within culture, community, family, friendships, relationships. For much of my life the idea of community felt far away. I errored in the opposite direction. My story went something like  I don’t need anyone or at least don’t want to need anyone. I aimed for fierce independence which got me nowhere quickly.  

These years of vision questing have healed so much  of that. Even though I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the support I received,  I needed it the most this time and felt a growing comfort in being  able to relax into the arms of community. That’s the beauty I think,  that we all get a chance to do this for one another in this ebb and flow of giving  and receiving.  It has been a time of receiving support and I think this alone was incredibly healing for me. 

One of the first insights I received came early on when 13 days felt like an eternity. Even when it gets really tough, a little voice told me, don’t wish this time of nothing away.  The first 4 days without food and water are always challenging for me and this quest was no exception.  I think the difference was that I wished it away less. I was able be with the extremes of thirsts more than usual, more curious about my bodies response then afraid. As for the rest of the days, I’ll get to that. For now to say the theme of staying with the entire process, beginning to end was the most prominent of all.

To say a few things on the practical side. The actual vision quest space is small, about 15 sqm and you have nothing to entertain you, not even a pen.  One of the things I’ve noticed is that it feels natural to want  to be as comfortable as possible. And why not try. On a vision quest however, the bar for comfort is dramatically lowered. You accept that many of your moments won’t be comfortable ones.  It’s a case of do what you can then let go and this is an ongoing process.

I notice one day for example that I could move a branch for more shade, or change the angle  of my tarp so that the rain runs off better. It feels good to evolve things and equally as good knowing the limitations. I’d say overall I have got a lot better at finding and making improvements in my space, working with the setting as well as possible. In that way I see it a little bit like a substitute for scouts training that I didn’t do much of in my youth. I have learned to value this line of practical intelligence so much. It has always been my weaker hand, and as Marcus Aurelius would say, its a good idea to develop skills that don’t come naturally or the ones we neglected in some way.

Next  post – reckoning with my story. Acceptance runs deeper than words.

One of the most useful ideas I ever heard was Ken Wilber’s distinction between absolute and relative truth.   It’s this seemingly paradoxical idea that the world  we are accustomed to  characterised  by polarity (no one thing can exist without its opposite)  also contains a non-polarised dimension – an absolute truth or Big mind as Wilber likes to say that has not been split. It’s the spacious, open awareness that we relax back into in meditation or what Sam Harris calls the “prior condition”.

Hurts more bother you less

Ken Wilber

Why this distinction is so useful to me is because it explains what our evolution can look like. Instead of thinking we need to be untouchable or if we are walking a spiritual path,  that we need to look like a more together kind of person less effected by worldly concerns we can hold a different point of view.  Evolving as these human creatures involves feeling more. That means it hurts even more but at the same time bother us less precisely because of the absolute realm.

When we are walking in both we know both realities as true. In absolute terms, there really is no problem to solve and we can relax in that. In relative terms, there is much work to do. Over leaning in either direction results in imbalance. On the one side it looks like spiritual bypassing and on the other crushed by the pain of humanity. The middle ground is this profound line  by Wilbur – Hurts more but bothers less. That we can feel the full spectrum of humanity and be grounded in what can never be touched.