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“I want our
people to know that they must come to understand their hurt and their pain if they are
going to get sober and find peace. Within our traditional ways, we have ceremonies for
anything we encounter”. Tatanka Manni (Walking Buffalo) Difficult to get a perspective on something I have experienced so recently and something which is still taking hold of me…but here goes. The Background Spent October in The States on the West coast mostly working and travelling but managed to get a weekend free in the company of the magnificent ‘B’. Now ‘B’ was the one (if you have been following the adventures so far) who introduced me to the story of the Mouse and the Wolf. And she had been invited to a Red Road Healing weekend with a Sioux Sundance leader, Tatanka Manni (Walking Buffalo). The group consisted of some twenty people, mostly psychiatrists, therapists, lawyers, teachers, as you would expect, most of whom for up to two years had been attending medicine wheel workshops in San Francisco with Ellen Fishburn. I had been honoured with the privilege of joining in the group and I must say felt nervous and apprehensive mainly because I had no knowledge of Native American culture. Dived in nonetheless. This is what it was aboutWhat Tatanka Manni has done is define Native American cultural healing in terms of our western understanding of psychology and healing. He explained to us the role of the Shaman as the archetype in most communities who is able take a journey to the Spirit World, (Void, Collective, Unconscious, Otherworld, Upperworld, Kingdom of Heaven or Lowerworld etc.) returning with the vision to provide service to mankind).Tatanka Manni has taken the model of C.G.Jung and, as it were, stuck it up against the light box face to face with his own method of healing called the Red Road. The Red Road is a traditional Red Nation medicine way of life, and it is available to all who would respect, understand and not misuse it.Within the many traditions of the Red Nation people, the central theme is the same - the quest for inner balance and harmony with the rest of creation. Having taught creativity most of my life, I thought I knew as much as there was to know about CGJ and dreams, the subconscious, the collective unconscious et alia. But, and this is where it gets interesting, what I obviously never twigged was how these three elements are separated in our culture and how we are not taught to travel between them. What do I mean?Tatanka Manni explained that our behaviour is obviously dictated by what has happened to us in the past (the unconscious has collected all this) and that if these past experiences have been negative, then our current behaviour is obviously controlled ,or to some extent at least, governed by such. Not only that, but our creativity, our intuition and even healing itself which come from the collective unconscious, will be blocked by these layers which contain material that we not only have to deal with but which we must have the courage to get beyond. The Shamanic journey enables us to get through to this collective arena where we can address those archetypes, source our creativity, intuition etc which thus addressed allows us to move on. Lost you?Well this is my point. The Native American medicine man will tell you that your understanding of the nature of the mind is identical to his. The big difference is that he will accompany you on a voyage perhaps through the various levels of your consciousness into both your unconscious and the collective unconscious, back to the conscious, and then straight to the collective on whichever route this voyage may take. And this voyage, this guidance, will happen with music and incantation and through sessions in the sweat lodge. And such a voyage of healing, T.M. explained, can be successful within twenty-four hours, not the six or seven years that so called western psychotherapy would take. Did I experience this? Yes I did. T.M. took us through drum, rattle, incantation sessions where he was able to take our minds from one level to the other, where we were able to see quite clearly what was, so to say, on the menu, visions, images whatever, in each of the three areas. Now of course I can't speak for the others, nor can I say I didn’t have to struggle with the everyday clunking back in from time to time but t’was most fascinating and for me illuminating in that I saw for the first time quite clearly, well, something that I simply had not understood (but always thought I had of course). Then the Sweat LodgeI’d always thought these were saunas for Californians! Wrong again! What happens is very clever. There we were, some twenty of us, crushed up in the most uncomfortable positions in the dark on a full moon inside what was actually a low slung tent. Outside a fire of cedar wood heating up huge stones. So there we were, all cramped up inside and then the stones (seven of them representing the seven directions, N.S.E.W., Father Sky, Mother Earth and Self) were brought in one by one, herbs thrown on them, sage and sweetgrass, occasionally cedar, water I think and then wham! We were hit by a wave of intense heat, which I must say was unbearable. Here it gets very interesting! You want to flee. You know where the entrance is and it would be easy to walk, or crawl, out but you stay. Your body is aching, your mind is saying ‘this is stupid, you don’t need this, wise up, get out quick’, but you stay! And then something happens which I can only relate to when I used to be a long distance runner (a story in itself). What happens is that in pushing yourself beyond a point of exhaustion, something clicks, you pass the pain threshold and actually begin to float, running but not conscious of the act and I suppose I could say almost flying physically as well as mentally in what can only be described as a different level of consciousness.This is what happens in the Sweat Lodge, the difference being that you are not alone in a landscape, but together with not just others but with an experienced leader who is guiding you and linking you to what? Well, it must be that arena we call the Collective Unconscious, which Native Americans would call communion with the Creator or Great Spirit, that place where creativity can be sourced, where dreams and intuition dwell and where healing can take place. Now I’m not about to write about what I personally experienced. At this level, everybody has to come at this and through this his or her own way. But the way the weekend closed was, I found, very illuminating and will show how somehow the collective experience in a way gets close to the subjective effectuality How it endedHere I should mention the value of the circle of community and how important this felt to me. Certainly T.M. was, as it were, at the center of this circle but it was the circle complete that gave a spiritual charge to what happened next. There were five people who’d asked to be healed of various maladies at the end of the session. It was to be a private affair and the rest of us were, I’d presumed, to tootle on home. I suppose we had all got quite close as one does on such weekends but for whatever reason the five had asked us all to stay as they went through it. Now this experience was not of my culture of our culture. Yet there was something that was recognizable, perhaps, no undoubtedly, once part of our culture in some Nordic or Celtic past? Familiar, but then eerily unfamiliar, to watch Tatanka Manni, this great man, heal through music and incantation, these five brave people who stood there and wept through seeming waves of compassion and dignity .Well, that’s as much as I can say. Except, as in all these things, you have to experience them for yourself. Hope I’ve encouraged you to do just that someday. Mice, December 1999
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