“Strange, but there was a space between the feeling I had when inspiration burned and my physical body. If only the two could walk together they would touch the Earth gently like dew on parched skinks tongue. The memory of a time they were united calls to me with whisperings of potential, but my fingers are unsure of the precise stitch to use to reweave the frayed umbilical threads. Still, I begin like a spider to work my web for catching a future of rainbow hue, trusting that sustenance will follow my hours at the loom. Sometimes cramps, discomfort, settle in my bones. I rise, stretch, return to my work. Only I see the loom and it's fabric emerging but others see a subtle change in me and wonder at it's source. For though we are all weaving, each of us use different tools and materials. Wood, bone, others blood, barbed wire, paper money, silk in the raw, river washed stones, garlands of flowers, concrete, glass, the wind, sound, fur, hair, silver, wolves claws, spirit, waves, negativity, pain, love, tears of salt, peace...........”
Generally when folks debate what the difference is between a shaman and a schizophrenic, whats really being talked about is can what we learn from one be used to help the other? That’s what brings me back to it, for someone else what they return to might take other forms. Schizophrenia is often portrayed as a one way street, and it generally doesn’t involve going back towards Kansas. As for shamans, they visit a version of Oz pretty regularly themselves.
Perhaps it’s this commonality of experiencing realities other than the everyday one, combined with then integrating what one finds there, that I’m both fascinated and inspired by. They are swimming in the same waters. Both want to retrieve soul, including their own. One once aware through conscious journeying, the other often dragged kicking and screaming by their own consciousness. Both experience altered states of reality. If both had the relief and support needed, without stigma, would their behaviour be more alike in terms of integration?
“I was a stricken deer, that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charg’d, when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
There was I found by another who had himself
Been hurt by th’ archers. In his side he bore,
And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.
With gentle force soliciting the darts,
He drew them forth, and heal’d, and bade me live.
Since then, with few associates, in remote
And silent woods I wander, far from those
My former partners of the peopled scene;
With few associates, and not wishing more.
Here much I ruminate, as much I may,
With other views of men and manners now
Than once.....
William Cowper, 'I was a Stricken Deer' in ' The Other Within' p7
Many people are experiencing psychological distress with the earth changes and natural disasters going down, giving a broader range of folks a taste of mental disorder or dis-ease. The varying degrees of pain, and insight, are coming to the surface. Chironic healing is coming to us all. How will we deal with our wounds? Where in the amazing labyrinth of human consciousness do we source our answers? The individual doesn’t exist in a vacuum, such processes are a response to an world in need of nourishment.
“Especially in Siberia and Mongolia, the first approach by the spirits takes the form of a violent onslaught which leads to what seems like a complete destruction of the future shamans personality. This is followed by a rebuilding of the shaman, whose new powers are not simply an external adjunct or tool, but amount to a form of insight, a perspective on the nature of the world, and especially on the particular forms of human suffering which he or she has just undergone so intensely. The internalisation of all these experiences will lead to the emergence of a new personality, and it is this which is expressed through the destruction of the shamans previous nature.” P39 "The Shaman" by Piers Vitebsky
Yet without the luminal experiences of those who hit extremes, we would have no spirituality, psychology, science, art or music, some of the peak systems and ways to improve life for all.
Mental breakdowns occur across all cultures, it’s a global phenomena, with similar themes but different content. In schizophrenia ‘delusions’ tend to be of a nasty, nasty slant. The format is persecutory, based on conspiracy, but the script is lustrously individualised to culture. Even when we are unaware of our indoctrination into its stories and myths, or wouldn’t consider ourselves active participants or practitioners.
Society’s can, and do, contain both schizophrenics and shamans at any given point in time. In fact, many shamans begin their initiatory times in realms that some would define as delusional or ‘psychotic’, a word which comes from the greek for soul/ mind and break. Such initiatory descents can last for years before someone learns to shamanise.
I acknowledge that schizophrenia has episodic immersion in uncontrolable seas, but that it need not be as permanent as some would have us believe. We can be diagnosed yet also integrated individuals, much of the time, some of who may work in shamanic ways.?
If we look at the life of The Sagay shaman Kyzlasov, he suffered illness for 7 years before becoming a shaman, and the becoming happened only after extensive self-reflection and training with elder shamans. He underwent the trials stipulated by his particular shamanic community.
P173 "The Shaman: Patterns of Religous Healing among the Ojibway Indians" by John A Grim
His wife speaks “ How did he become a shaman? Sickness seized him when he was 23 years old and he became a shaman when at the age of thirty. That was how he became a shaman, after the sickness, after the torture. He had been ill for seven years. While he was ailing he had dreams: he was beaten up several times, sometimes he was taken to strange places. He has been around quite a lot in his dreams and he has seen many things.”
It is a crisis of the soul that can be labelled in different contexts as different things, but what if we allow that mental disorder may be part of a process towards integration rather than an end point or an either / or dicotomy.
Who's to say how long a healing journey should take? Its both rare, and consumerist, to expect for it to happen in say one session. It may be triggered by one intense session, but ask a herbalist, a masseuse. It could be a brief period, or lifelong, the time it takes in regathering to decipher what message ones bringing back, and in what form it can eloquently be expressed. Perhaps the only way is to do so is in
non-ordinary reality on a journey no one else can share.
In breakdown our mind is opening us up, cracking us apart to put us back together again, in a surge towards eventual growth, or death, whatever we ‘call’ the pathway that leads there.
“The crisis of a powerfull illness can also be the central experience of the shaman’s initiation. It involves an encounter with forces that decay and destroy. The shaman not only survives the ordeal of a debilitating sickness or accident but is healed in the process. Illness thus becomes the vehicle to a higher plane of consciousness. The evolution from a state of psychic and physical disintegration to shamanising is effected through the experience of self cure. The shaman - and only the shaman – is a healer who has healed himself or herself; and as a healed healer, only he or she can truley know the territory of disease and death.” Joan Halifax pp10-11 egs
“There is a great beauty up here
Wild flowers, small creatures
Live and grow togther
All except for me, in perfect harmony”
Grahame Doyle, quoted in "For Mathew and Others" p50
Depression and other mind dis-eases are signs of imbalance in a person, but are not the person, any more than cancer is the whole of the person. Yet, often there is fear around people who are experiencing chronic, or life threatening symptoms, which mental illness can be, even though neither is contagious. In fact, such a potent illness pattern can, potentially, create insights into life.
It seems at this time, the two labels, which is what both schizophrenia and shamanism are, are on a sliding scale of groovyness, and schizophrenia isnt at the higher end. How many folks say in conversation “Id love to be crazy! Maybe I could study how to with someone?. Experience so much internal pain I disassociate, no thanks, but hallucinate, and there it is. The latter is desirable.
In controlled doses, humans have longed for shifts in consciousness as long as we’ve been bipeds, but what we want is the ecstasy. What we don’t want is the messy, chaotic, difficult parts.
Who can blame us, they can hurt and bewilder.
I don’t know how many times (actually I do, too many) I took some form of manufactured pharmaceutical waiting for the blissful colours, sensual beauty and etheric floating beings that others seemed to enjoy, with rather messy brain scrambling results. I know some of the fascinating lights, I saw them in my bedroom as a young girl, and called them faeries. No offence to any fey, but apparently they don’t exist. To put it all in perspective, I think maybe faeries walk around going, humans naaah impossible, how could anything that weirdo exist.
“Like the giraffe and the duck billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable. Nevertheless, they exist, they are facts of observation; and as such, they cannot be ignored by anyone trying to understand the world in which he lives.”
* Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell
Shamans, as walkers between the worlds, journey for both individuals, and their communitys. Its hard to bring back information from other realms, and have it heard, when the diagnosis of a mental illness has been given. There is a tendency to create a blanket of ‘delusion’ for spiritual or symbolic experiences. This can be confusing, especially when there is valid material going on. In trying to piece peoples fragmented lives back together after an episode, perhaps material is dismissed that could be useful for reintegration.
“Imagination is a modern Western concept that is outside the realm of shamanism. ‘Imagination’ already prejudices what is happening. I don’t think it is imagination as we ordinarily understand it. I think we are entering something which, surprisingly, is universal - regardless of culture. Certainly people are influenced by their own history, their cultural and individual history. But we are beginning to discover a map of the upper and lower world, regardless of culture. For the shaman, what one sees – thats real. What one reads out of a book is secondhand information. But just like the scientist, the shaman depends upon first – hand observation to decide whats real. If you cant trust what you see yourself, then what can you trust?”
Michael Harner interviewed by Neville Drury in November 1984
“Most people equate the imagination with unreality. Nothing could be further from the truth. The imagination is a power of the mind to create and work with images. It is this ability which can open us to other realms, assist us in healing, help us to discover lost knowledge and to open to higher vision and even prophecy.”p8 "Animal Speak" by Ted Andrews
I understand analysing painful, or loaded, material can bring it back to the surface and if unguided, or not grounded, symptoms can flare up or be reexperienced. Its a responsibility to reopen someones wounds, as these are usually what originally caused a fracture, that becomes a diagnosis. For suffering individuals, they may not want to go near this stuff, but at times its overflowing into their reality without permission screaming for reintegration. Which is also as I believe, one of the reasons people with a mental illness are ostracised, bullied and feared. We reflect back difficult emotions that others may not want to look at, shadow material that’s kept at a distance by placing on ‘other’, and then avoided like the plague.
“I see people with schizophrenia are being like the canary down the mine. When the gas comes they sing first. And in a sense often peoples delusions when they’re not well, and even their sensitivies when they are well, are attuned to currents in society that are threatening.”
Simon champ p29 in "For Matthew and Others"
"The inward journey of the
mythological hero, the shaman, the mystic and the schizophrenic are in principle the
same; and when the return or remission occurs, it is experienced as a rebirth."
We all have our limits and boundaries around avoiding suffering and difficulty, in self but also in those we allow close to us. If someone’s gone off the deep end, social isolation and rejection serve to compound it, but ironically in such sensitive states solitude can have healing potentials by reducing stimulus input. Calm, peaceful, natural environments can ease symptoms barrage or perhaps its more that high density, overly busy and intense ones can exacerbate them.
I do believe sensitivity to trauma plays a large role in psychotic suffering, be that the end of a relationship, the loss of a loved one, childhood abuse, bullying or violence. It’s like the emotional pain overflows into the brain and puts it on overload, nightmare materials, and hauntings are its response. But I do also believe when you keep fragmenting, each time a little more information gets through before its overwhelming. Pain full and torturous, but eventually you begin to connect with a large part of the story of your life so far. Abuse and or/trauma clarifies and distils, till here I have some of my personal wounding truths, that we all possess. This is what therapy is meant to bypass, but knowing something intellectually is one thing, connecting to it in our body and emotions can be another.
In schizophrenia the voices heard may become enemies, demons, abusers or perpetrators . But there’s a thread of truth, a story, that runs through such experiences that may well be asking for the voicing of the unspeakable. That comes through in the hardest of tales to bear listening, or witnessing. Psychosis, and disassociation, may infact be asking just this, that someone bears witness. This can mean a lot when your experience has largely been dismissed or your opinions ignored. Is it this that often leads people to seek help, or avoid it?
If there’s illness what is its teaching? What’s going on there? Pain is a call to draw some lovin’ attention to an area, preferably before it gets worse but also, it might need to get louder to be heard.
Too much pain and an organism shuts down, into catatonia, coma, fainting, yet even there the body is protecting herself. We love and care for our health even when we don’t know it.
The brain, and nervous system, in part could actually be seen as a protective and eliminatory filtering system, to keep us from being overwhelmed by sensory input. They take the mass of abounding input, and reduce it down. Sorting, filing it away to make sense of it, making piles to look at later and allowing for daily functioning, an ability to focus on the practical task at hand.
The human brain is so complex that we have only minute understandings of it and need to acknowledge this. The Desana people of Columbia have a detailed language around the structure of the human brain that matches what science has discovered through catscans and other imaging techniques. It was put well when a Desana shaman said “It contains colours that we don’t even know the names of.” Knudson + Suzuki in "Wisdom of the Elders" p75
However, in a simplified version of the chemistry of serotonin, the neurotransmitter targeted by modern anti psychotic medications (SSRIs). Increased seratonin levels reduce the amount of input the brain is taking in. The uncontrolled sensory input of reduced seratonin is felt as the brain coexhisting with internal/ external input, unwilling to select which is the one truth to focus on, but experiencing many at the same level. Much like a hearing aid, where many voices are heard at the same volume, as there is no way for the gadget to discern which voice you are listening to. A common example, coffee increases seratonin levels, blocking out environmental/internal stimulus, to focus on task orientation.
Artists at work drop seratonin levels and are ok with the process, or to see it another way those with dropped seratonin levels can use creativity to learn to be ok with that, or be drawn to meditative states of being.
“Psychiatric clinicians are learning to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, as we increasingly try to give up our controlling interest over mentally ill people and stop pronouncing that “we know what’s best for you “. We are just beginning to acknowledge our past complicity and are now trying harder to provide such individuals with a foundation for recovery in their own terms. The recovery journey may include discovering art as a medium for self expression, or sometimes as a promising career.”
Alan Rosen in essay in "For Mathew and Others" p19
Most people who take neuroleptics, or ‘anti-psychotics’ dislike doing so. Its an interesting phenomena that these medications have no place on the black market, unlike most mind altering drugs (Gosden163). Neuroleptics reduce the circulation of dopamine. Dopamine is called the ‘reward’ transmitter, because when we accomplish something our brain triggers its release, be that running a marathon, or making love. It is also involved, as seen in Merzenichs work, in plastic change in the brain. The same surge of dopamine that thrills us also consolidates the neuronal connections responsible for the behaviour that led us to accomplish our goal. (Doidge 107?)
To give an idea of the intensity some folks experience psycho active plants tend to drop seratonin levels. As you can imagine such intensity of imagery and altered sensory activity in a busy environment gets pretty full on, quietude and calm surroundings can help life be a better trip.
"The typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining, marginal to his society, incapable of holding a regular job, these people live on the fringes, content to drift in their own self created value system..."
Terrence McKenna, you could do way worse eh.
Another factor is that external noise, like conversations, or music, can trigger voice hearing and thereby create confusion but also at low levels help to distract from voices. If there’s an audible conversation going on and you’re hearing folks talking about you, it’s pretty human to listen. At the same time it can be painful and frightening to attempt to reality check abusive or hostile voices threatening insults, and it doesn’t necessarily clear them. You begin to see why many folk with a diagnosis, or experiencing voices, can become isolated, in their search for peace. Also how direct experiences with nature can heal the soul.
If I look to plants, they can be growing between a rock and a hard place, yet still the energy of growth exists. It looks different for each plant, but the direction is towards growth. Illness can ‘shape’ our limitations, but also our unique pattern of growth that can lead to creative ways of dealing with and adapting to circumstance. Plants take their circumstances and make medicine. Infact among the vegetalistas – plant inspired shamans of Peru- there is a belief that shamans can be taught by the plants themselves.
“ The vegatalistas also believe that painters and musicians can be taught their skills by plants.”
Those who ingest ayahuasca, the sacred plant of the vegalistas do so with the knowledge that they may well face spirits of terror, suffering before, if any, exctasy. This is no trip to take lightly or irrevelantly but if one survives the experience there can be a healing.
Psychotherapy could be said to play a similar role dealing with the subconscious matter we carry.
As Susun Weed teaches, the wisewoman doesn’t ask why do i have this problem? The answer to that question is always blame and guilt, she asks instead, what part of myself does this problem show me? How can I nourish that part of me so it is less needy and has less control over me?
Life is a series of changes in the bodys ecosystem. It becomes a battlefield if each one must be ‘cured’, as a disturbance to some image of ‘pure’ health. One can have a disability and still be healthy. Curing a disease sounds so disempowering, like the ad with some animated nasty attacking an internal shot of someone’s body until ta da here comes product a, b or c. Its giving the focus to the disease rather than the human being, who’s left on the sidelines going um hello, over here, my brain, my body anyone interested in what i feel, how Id like to be treated.
When someone is in crisis, usually they still carry a desire for both independence, and the support to follow their own path. The strength that can come from appropriate assistance exists for all of us. Allys serve to enhance the shamans ability and skills, hopefully the same can be said of the people anyone chooses to include in their healing journey, but not always.
“The path towards the forest that contained the trees of sadness was a well worn one. Many bare footfalls had indented it into the earth exposing roots that could trip one if unaware. A hollow wind moved between branches carrying memories that haunted tear stained eyes, drying the salty wetness. Autumn had left the trees exposed, their tortured limbs twisted with grief. An empty place one might think, and yet where the trees touched each other there was a smoothness to their trunks as if a warm energy had been exchanged, massaging the wrinkles of worry away from them, and on the ground below this smoothness small sproutlets of greenery were appearing, unfurling fern fronds, orchid stems flourishing in the humid moisture the shared tears of branches created.
If a traveller was to lift their head for a moment and reach out to touch the smoothness the whole forest would shiver in gratitude and empathy, and a whisper of music would echo through the space, the loneliness of the trees speaking through instruments no human hand had created, for who wants to wander long in the forest of sadness? Yet so many find themselves there, some becoming lost and never finding their way from amongst its arms. For the ways to and from there are as many and varied as there are creatures who walk, swim or fly on the globe that its roots reach into, and for each person the way out is different. Some in a daze of forgetfulness remember no other landscape and become rooted to the spot, paralysed. In time they grow roots and wooden limbs and find themselves one of the very trees they once wandered amongst. So it is also the forest of compassion for it feels with the journeyers who pass its way and it is this compassion that fertilises a small field of white roses in the very heart of the woods, where the paths are softened by silk-like petals and the air is perfumed. If one finds her feet walking this path she is changed forever. It is here that friends sit quietly waiting to gently offer a way home."
I had set up my altar for Beltane while on the other side of the
