Medicine — Part II

In my last post – Medicine – Part I – I wanted to provide a foundation and framework in which to speak about “medicine” – as in plant medicine, medicine journeys, etc. I defined “medicine” as anything that brings us closer to wholeness – physical, emotional, energetic, etc., and  I included the image of the whole self (reproduced here), where, the horizontal line marks the division between what is conscious (above) and what’s unconscious (below).

In this diagram, it’s obvious the vast majority of who we are lies beneath the line.  Healing and integration can take place within one or the other of these realms – the conscious or unconscious, the Known or the Unknown — or between them. Removing a ruptured spleen, taking Lipitor to reduce cholesterol, or antibiotics to combat Lyme disease are all forms of healing – medicine –that can have little to no relation to the agendas of the conscious mind and the ways it perceives or identifies itself. Similarly, many useful practices can attend primarily to the conscious self – learning principles of mindful communication or conflict resolution, for example — with little focus on accessing deeper realms of who we are or can be.

I’ve practiced a tradition of vision quests for over 30 years in which the solo, fasting part of the process is preceded by four days of preparation. During this time, participants build a healing community of fellow travelers, are assisted in fine-tuning their intentions and purposes, and are given a smorgasbord of tools for making the journey deeper and more impactful. Then, the solo, taking place while fasting and immersed in the wilderness — an “altered state” in its own right – precedes three days focused on how the new insights, realizations, and commitments revealed during “the sacred time” can be brought back and applied to make a difference in the daily world so one’s life is more purposeful, integrated, and whole.

Having rarely seen anything remotely equivalent in the contemporary use of plant medicines, I sometimes wonder how much medicine actually results from some of these “medicine ceremonies.” In most, attendees receive little or no preparation beforehand other than a few dietary restrictions (sent by email). Those who come have minimal or no tools provided for examining and clarifying their intention and purposes, no framework for addressing their current or habitual difficulties and their underlying assumptions and stories, and little in the way of new organizing perspectives and paradigms broad enough to hold and “make sense” of experiences unexplainable by consensual reality. Usually, after a brief period of settling in within a room of mostly strangers, there’s a short introduction and the ceremony begins.

Then, after the experience itself, there’s often little to no time or attempt to weave the elements of the “new dream” into the fabric of one’s current reality… or determine a set of practices or acts to incorporate this new energy into the structure of one’s life. In the last ceremony I attended there was a short “integration circle” at the end — and many ceremonies lack even that — in which people shared a few details and insights of the previous night’s journey. I remember a young woman speaking enthusiastically, “Grandmother (ayahuasca) showed me this” and “Grandmother told me that.” It (and she)  was sweet, and I hoped she received something that was practical and useful. But this testimonial sounded remarkably similar to many others – just substitute the word, “Jesus,” (or “my astrologer”) for “Grandmother.”

In my previous post, I suggested imagining the diagram’s horizontal line to be the surface of the earth. We live above the ground in conscious reality – or assume we do — because that’s what we can see. But survival depends on having a well that dips beneath the surface and a bucket to bring up water from the vast lake — the Mystery, true Self or Soul realm — beneath.

Without preparation and wisdom, without a map or coherent set of teachings to “make sense” of what is mysterious and irrational, we run the risk of spiritual materialism… of stuffing the Unknown into the familiar old boxes of the known. When we insist on saying, “Grandmother showed me this or told me that,” (or “Saint Teresa” or “my local psychic” …) we praise and worship the bucket and miss the water.

In a post soon to follow – “Medicine, Part III” – I want to give some examples of what a deeper integration can look like.

~ Sparrow Hart… November 3, 2019