Tag Archives: cosmology

Peace Circles

Healing, Indigenous Science, Relationships, , , , , , , , , , ,

earthethospeacecircleBlog by Valerie

“Stories are medicine…embedded with instructions” that guide us about how to live our lives (Estés, 1997). Practices of talking circles, or peace circles, have emerged within many cultures throughout known human history, though most modern Westerners don’t understand underlying cosmological foundations of these practices, which come from indigenous cultures. The talking circle is a metaphorical life tool of the medicine wheel. Being aware about what we are doing allows metaphor to bring ceremonies like talking circles to life (Rael, 1998). It is no mystery why, in Australia for example, when people with indigenous ancestry facilitate yarning circles, a type of talking circle, it feels different than when Westerners do. I learned why while working for a decade in the field of restorative justice. When we encouraged people to put altars in the middle of their circles, I had quite an aha moment when I saw what people were using to metaphorically represent the heart centre. “A common mistake when examining myths of other cultures is to interpret them with symbols and values of our own culture” (Gleiser, 2012). Common values of the dominant Western cosmology such as competition, hierarchy, individualism, and the primacy of the nuclear family greatly limit our ability to embody indigenous wisdom (Thibodeau & Nixon, 2013). When this happens, ceremonies can “become empty of their power” (Rael, 1998).a

Consider the difference between participating in a plant medicine ceremony in the jungles of Peru with a shaman who spent decades apprenticing with a teacher and working with plants and spirits of the jungle deeply connected with the land and its ancestors, versus participating in a plant medicine ceremony in an apartment in a Western city facilitated by someone who got the medicine from such a shaman and perhaps studied with the shaman for a short period of time. (Image is a screenshot from an online gallery of Amazonian-Andean artist Juan Carlos Taminchi of ayahuasca visions.)taminchiartThe depth of relationships, and the experiences, feel quite different to participants. Similarly, instead of peace circles as a tool to help control behaviour or improve the way people speak and listen to each other as is common in westernised restorative justice practices based on a Judeo-Christian worldview, an Earth Ethos peace circle is an opportunity for a communal spiritual experience based on an indigenous cultural cosmology. Because of the intentional use of metaphor, it ought to feel different to participants (and certainly does to me) than simply sitting in a circle (or around a table where we are blocked from connecting with each other physically) and passing around a talking piece. Many indigenous peoples use oral traditions to preserve cultural wisdom. Verbal repetition and physical embodiment of teachings keeps them pure (Rael, 2015). An important aspect of any medicine wheel ceremony, including a peace circle, is purification or cleansing, opening participants’ hearts for sharing wisdom as a community. Purification is often symbolised through the use of smoke, or smudging.

ent.jpgHealing of, and prevention of, dis-ease requires ceremony. Ceremony is an important human practice connecting the visible material/physical world with the invisible, spiritual world. Life feels empty and unsatisfying when we do not do enough ceremony, and ceremonies are most powerful done regularly and intentionally in community (Rael, 1998). Disease in indigenous thinking is caused by natural and supernatural forces, where natural forces include things like cold air, germs, or impurities in food and water, and supernatural forces include things like upset social relations between people, with ancestors, or other beings such as spirits of the traditional custodians of a place (Sussman, 2004). (Image is a depiction of one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s land spirits called the Ent, a tree spirit) Western concepts of unconscious or subconscious drives are similar to indigenous concepts of such spiritual forces (Holliday, 2008). When we focus our energy on cultivating healthy invisible environments based on values such as acceptance, non-judgment, inclusivity, compassion and empathy, we help purify our own hearts and the collective unconscious, or the spiritual realm. Indigenous thinking teaches that our social reality is based on a fundamental understanding of life in which humans are interconnected with all of nature, and by participating in an Earth Ethos peace circle, we literally embody Mother Earth together by sitting in a circle with an altar at the centre honouring the interconnected web of life we are part of. If you want to join an Earth Ethos peace circle, please contact me for more information.

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Dignity & privilege

Decolonising, Values, , , , , , , , ,

Blog by Valerie

One of the basic premises of an Earth Ethos, and of indigenous teachings generally, is an innate worthiness of being. It does not depend on behaviour or social status or species; all beings on Earth are of worth. This is the foundation of dignity, whose root comes from Latin for “to accept, to take.” In the previous post I wrote about how acceptance keeps us in the present moment. And when we’re in the present moment in a state of worthiness, we are strong and we are dignified, even if behaviour of another person is not. Privilege, on the other

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hand, comes from the Latin words for “private” and “law,” indicating an advantage, right or priority over another person, group, or even species. In social justice circles there has been a lot of discussion in recent years of privilege related to race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, class, age, citizenship, and disability. I know there are real life impacts for many of us because of social privileges, but our focus on these inequities distracts us from the important work of ensuring that we stand in dignity and see others that way regardless of their behaviour or beliefs. It’s our responsibility to remember that regardless of the domination of certain social stories and world views, there is innate dignity in all ways of being. Stories are powerful because we feed them, even if we do so by fighting.

It does not matter if a person has a million dollar home or a high social status job, being in denial and numb to painful feelings is not a privilege, is it disembodiment, disconnection with self, others, and the present moment. It is a disabled and difficult way to navigate the world. I know this because after numerous efforts to ask for help and protect myself from sexual abuse as a child failed, I dissociated, and did not re-member those experiences until my mid-twenties. My life before that was really hard and confusing. It has taken many years and hard work to build a trusting relationship with myself. I have had to let go of and reform numerous unhealthy relationships including my entire family of origin; I have had to ride out decisions based on that denial and numbness and give myself grace in the process; and I have had to dig deep into my psyche to question foundational stories and beliefs that guided me for over 20 years, and replace them with ones that feel and work better. (Image from here. And like skill, you could rank by social privilege as well.)dignity-cartoon.png

Sometimes it feels like we have no choice, because everyone around us is on board; we feel forced to accept global stories like, for instance, capitalism, or countries and borders, or languages we communicate with. These big stories do privilege certain values and world-views. This is Christmas season. How many of us know that Jesus was not born on this day, and that the Catholic Church repurposed indigenous European celebrations for winter solstice over 400 years after Jesus’s death? (Even a Christian site called www.allaboutgod.com knows this. In fact, many of the so-called Christmas traditions have strange histories. It’s okay to celebrate something on another day, like when it’s your birthday on a Tuesday and you have a party the Saturday before, but it’s less powerful than if you celebrated the actual date. It’s the same with solstice. It would be a lot more powerful if we celebrated winter/summer solstice on the actual celestial days instead of the days chosen for Easter/Christmas depending which hemisphere you’re in.Consider connecting with the powerful celestial energy this solstice and doing something to celebrate our planet regardless of what else you celebrate. In the southern hemisphere, Christmas celebrations with fake snowmen, fake pine trees, fake garlands, and sweaty Santas in summer are farcical. (Image from here.)

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It is of course possible to be dignified in celebrating Christmas; it is meaningful to many people. It is also important to recognise, whether you celebrate it or not, that in society right now Christmas is privileged, and to consciously decide how you want to behave given that social reality. Most of us get time off of work for Christmas, and some of us have to use our vacation to celebrate days that are meaningful to us which are not socially privileged. If you have not taken the time to reflect on what the elements of the modern Christmas celebration mean to you and whether your participation aligns with your values and world view, I encourage you to. How could I get out of this if I wanted to?you might ask. Everyone buys presents, decorates houses and offices, makes certain foods, plays certain music, and expects me to join in. Didn’t anyone ever ask you as a kid if everyone was jumping off a cliff if you would too when you used that sort of logic? Christmas celebrations started to feel empty to me as my sex abuse memories were integrating. Christmas memories from childhood were joyful because my dad spent time doing creative things with me, not because there was deep meaning in the specific activities. I didn’t know why I was busily making and buying things, as I am not a dignityquote2.jpgmaterialist or a Christian, so I told people close to me I would focus on birthdays and important life events, and I stopped. I don’t want to deprive anyone of the joy of giving, but I don’t want to feel burdened receiving what is intended as a gift, so I told people close to me if they want to give me something, I prefer personal notes, meals, time together, and handmade art. I dislike expectations to behave a certain way on a day that is not especially meaningful to me, so Luke and I take short trips just the two of us over Christmas to enjoy Mother Nature instead. This all make it easier for me to stand in dignity because I am accepting me and not playing a victim by gracefully navigating a situation where my way of being is not socially privileged. Cultivating the discipline to deny ourselves that which brings us pain and suffering helps us stand in dignity and experience more joyful abundance.

From a pagan friend: Happy Holidays meme.jpg

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Questioning Cosmology

Culture, Decolonising, Spiritual Skills, , , , , , , , ,

christin-hume-482896-unsplash.jpg

Blog by Valerie

Stories are great teachers. They help us give meaning to events, teach core values, and inform our understandings of social order and individual identity (Engel, 1993). We each carry stories, personal mythologies, that form our core values and beliefs, help us understand our place, and guide us on our path. The concept of empathy, of deep listening and heartfelt storytelling, is central to oral-based cultures, and even in cultures that privilege the written word, such practices are considered deeply sacred, like the Catholic Confessional, or an important part of daily life, like meeting a friend or family member for a chat/yarn. (Free use photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash)

In practice, empathic listening, and the safe sharing stories, is limited by the cosmologies of participants. When we share a story with someone, and that person is in a state of being in denial/judgment about what we are saying, we experience rejection/lack. When we receive this reflection, we tend to feel shamed. And especially as children, or because we feel fear of being exiled from our family/tribe/community, we carry this shame in our own hearts and minds, fuelling feelings of low self-worth. Rejection is a deep pain to process, a lack of feeling whole. And most of us have inherited much of this due to ancestral trauma. An Earth Ethos suggests that those of us who are involved in violent behaviours, in whatever role (victim, offender, or bystander), carry elements of shame in our very senses of identity (Thibodeau & Nixon, 2013; Sawatsky, 2009). This shame, often referred to as “sin” creates feelings of lack of worth and dissociates us from fully being present. We fear social exile, and rightly so, because without connection with other people, it is hard to live. (Image from here)

exclude

When I did research with sex offenders, I heard a lot about the depth of social shame they felt. I heard about some men who were disturbed by sexual thoughts of children and were too terrified to seek help until they acted on it, and others who did seek professional help and were reported for abuse they had not committed. I felt an intensely painful energy in the space of social stigmatisation where so many of these people and their family members and friends, these fellow humans, live.

compromiseI encourage you to connect with your own cosmology and question rejecting/violent statements/thoughts like “He should have known better”, or “It serves her right.” Such words indicate an internalised denial/judgment and fuel shameful, painful feelings inside you, the person you are speaking/thinking about, and our collective culture. Even when we believe/think something is wrong, we can still hold that aspect of our cosmology with compassion and respect. These words are pointers to places of yourself that could be further explored, unpacked, and transformed. Dangers and fears come in many forms, including physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Watching an interview with someone who has killed another person, for example, may trigger emotion you are carrying and show aspects of your cosmology that could be shifted from judgment or denial/lack into compassion and empathy, and gratitude that you did not need to learn such a lesson the hard way. (Free photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash)

Exercise: Reflect on how many compromises you make in the name of “social harmony”/fear of change, and when it is important to you to go against the grain. See if you can connect with an aspect of your own humanity that is unfamiliar, like your “inner prostitute,” “inner abusive parent,” or “inner murderer”, and be with the discomfort that comes up in order to hold people in that space, and yourself, in more compassion and gentleness.

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Holiness

Decolonising, Healing, Indigenous Science, Values, , , , , , , , ,

Blog by Valerie

Most of you reading this, like me, grew up a Judeo-Christian culture. And like many of you, I experienced conflicts and hypocrisies with aspects of those teachings. One such conflict is with the concept of “The Holy Land.” I have always known deep in my bones that all land is holy land, and that all bodies and beings are holy and sacred and worthy. To elevate a particular place as “Holy” is to demote other places as un-holy or less-holy. Not surprisingly, the etymology of the world “holy” is “healthy” and “whole.” If only one place on Earth is “The Holy Land”, and only about eight million people live there, then by definition, the rest of us 4+ billion people are in exile, cut off from our Motherland, not feeling whole.

adameveThe foundation of Judeo-Christian mythology leaves us unconnected with environments where the vast majority of its followers live. The Biblical creation story of Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden of Eden is not an embodied story connecting humans with nature inside and outside ourselves within a web of life. In fact, the entire Earth has not, for some time in Judeo-Christian culture, been portrayed as a home, as much as a place to endure or get through (Gustafson, 1997). Feeling rejected by the Sacred Feminine, we are collectively convinced we are in exile, and so it follows that many of us live in our heads and suffer from mental illness. (Image from here, altered for copyright from this image.)

Indigenous, Earth Ethos thinking challenges this vision. As Lee Standing Bear Moore and Takatoka of the Manataka American Indian Council say** (This is where I originally saw this quote, but that Council no longer exists, and I have since realised it is published verbatim in this book).

If God created the universe and countless universes beyond our own into infinity, it is clear that part of the master plan was to place God’s creatures in a place where everything they see and touch in nature is healing medicine.  What better place to care for the children of Creation?  Therefore, the Garden of Eden is symbolic for the Kingdom of God and it exists as we see it, and live in its midst, both physically and spiritually.   The Mother Earth is part of the Kingdom of God and thus humans and other creatures present in the garden were never expelled, but remain to live and evolve.   Eden is all around us, everything we see in nature and beyond is the garden and Kingdom of God.  We are here and never left. [emphasis added]

So the Christian fundamentalists asking us to repent because the Kingdom of Heaven is here now are onto something. repent(Image from here.) 

I invite you to imagine what your life would look and feel like if every land you walked upon was treated like holy land; if every human body you came into contact with including your own were treated like holy land; if every animal and plant you ate, every mineral and stone mined and built into your smartphone and car and house were treated like holy land. Indigenous thinking sees the Earth as the source of life, not a resource to be used for a period of time. The understanding that all land is holy, that all of us are wanted and held by Mother Earth where we are now regardless of our ancestor’s trauma of leaving their Motherland, is incredibly freeing. I first experienced this healing during an indigenous dance-fast ceremony in Colorado following teachings of Joseph Rael. I remember kneeling in front of a tree during the ceremony and weeping with the realisation of how much Mother Earth wanted and cared for me, how much pain I had been carrying disconnecting me from those feelings, and how much pressure that had been placing on other relationships, especially my birth mother.

Years ago I read a book whose central thesis really stuck with me written by Wilhelm Reich, a controversial former student of Freud. Reich said that more than anything, we are truly afraid of pleasure, joy, and the abundance of gifts always in our midst; that we have collectively, in Judeo-Christian/Western culture, grown used to identifying with a fundamental sense of rejection, so that we shy away from profound opportunities for acceptance. I remember too, years ago, reading about the origin and etymology of the word sin:

[T]he most common word translated as “sin” is chait. The “sin” of Adam and Eve was chait, a mistake. People don’t “sin.” People make mistakes. After all, we are human.

sinThis word “sin,” then, was meant to help us humans understand our nature: that we are powerful and able create wonders and also an innate capacity to blunder. What curious creatures we are! We have been believing and embodying an errant, mistaken thought and believing that we are exiled, unworthy, and that our sacred, earthly Mother doesn’t fully love us, and this sin/mistake/confusion has been defining the course of our collective history for multiple millennia, and is still going. If this isn’t Wetiko energy, I don’t know what is! (Image from here.)

Faced with so many reflections around us of our collective disconnection with Mother Earth, our bodies, fellow beings, and elements of our environment necessary for living like our water and air, it helps to have a sense of humour. Here’s a quote from George Carlin:

The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”

Exercise: I invite you to re-think the concept of “holiday” and “other” days, and generally how you carry and embody being holy.

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Earth Ethos: an embodied philosophy

Culture, Decolonising, Healing, Indigenous Science, Relationships, Spiritual Skills, Values, , , , ,

Blog by Valerie

An Earth Ethos considers healing to be synonymous with justice. This philosophy is based on indigenous wisdom, where “indigenous” refers to cultures grown in connection to specific places such as aboriginal tribal members, as well as more generally a holistic worldview honouring the interconnection of all beings and viewing life as cyclical (Cervantes & McNeill, 2008). An Earth Ethos is evident in beliefs and practices of cultures around the world, and is being resurrected in modern Western culture through the work of indigenous peoples who share wisdom with non-members, as well as modern people who work to integrate such teachings and ways of being into modern life. Whoever you are, you were born of and on the Earth and are indigenous to some land and lineage(s).

prettytree

Understandings of justice grow out of cultural cosmologies. In indigenous cosmologies, there is no fall from grace in Heaven, no exile from abundance in the Garden of Eden, and no criminal action of eating a forbidden apple that a God has used to punish us humans. Because humans are firmly established in a particular space and time based on cultural mythology and birth, from an indigenous perspective, there is nothing to prove and no nature to discover. It is inherent (Rael, 1997). While feminism has challenged patriarchal perspectives, we still needed to challenge anthropocentric (human-centric) and ethnocentric perspectives in Western culture. We need to experience empathy with our entire human family and with all beings, to remember how to live in reciprocity with the Earth, deeply honouring our source of human life and re-evaluate core aspects of our cultural and individual identities (Ohiyesa, 2001).

The Western concept of authority is out of balance. Former philosopher Alan Bloom said, “The West is defined by its need for self-justification and to discover nature, and both philosophy, whether religious or secular, and science reflect this human quest to know nature (1986). Sharon Venne, a Cree lawyer said of First Nations that: “Our sovereignty is related to our connection to the earth and is inherent” (1999). Former Menominee activist Ingrid Washinawatok agreed that “Europeans relegated sovereignty to only one realm of existence: authority, supremacy and dominion. In the Indigenous realm, sovereignty encompasses responsibility, reciprocity, the land, life and much more” (1999).

cleanearth

In Western culture the Earth is often portrayed as a place to endure, whereas an Earth Ethos sees the Earth as the source of life, not a resource to be used for a period of time. The Earth’s health is intimately connected with and reflective of human health, because the Earth is a living Mother supporting us all. To consider a rock or tree as non-living or non-sentient places humans at the centre of the universe and devalues everyone. This results in “war to determine whose anthropocentric view is most valid” while “the earth and all its inhabitants []suffer” (Gustafson, 1997). Our bodies are made of the soil of this planet, and we are all united in our hearts. An Earth Ethos sees minerals, insects, plants, animals and other beings not only as ancestors, but as wise life forms that can teach us humans how to live in harmony with the rest of nature, since they have successfully survived on Earth a lot longer than we have. We humans are the new species on the block, and an Earth Ethos acknowledges with humility that as a species we are out of balance and in need of healing.

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