Monday with Hiah Park
September 12, 2016
What did I know of the Medicine Wheel, the journey through it, or the starting point?
I think of the Medicine Wheel as a Cosmic Blueprint, a Mandala of this Greater Medicine Wheel of the Universe, where
everything created has its appropriate place, all things moving inward from the circumference to the Center.
Once we catch a glimpse of the Blueprint we find its mandalas everywhere, from massive stone circles like Stonehenge, to the child’s spinning top, to the great rose window of the Gothic
Cathedrals, reflecting the Celestial Rose, beyond the limitations of time and space.
The will rolled onward like a Wheel
In even motion, by the Love impelled,
That moves the sun in Heaven and all the stars.
Dante
Ezekiel’s vision; the zodiac; the Wheel of Life; the Serpent swallowing its tail; the Wheel of Law, Truth and Light, one of the eight emblems of good fortune in Chinese Taoism; Navajo sand-paintings showing the creation of the world, with glyphs of the sun, earth, water, the four winds and Four Powers ruling Directions; these and myriad more are the mandalas of the Medicine Wheel.
The Shamanic journey starts when we begin to live what we have grasped of the Great Plan.
Where we start? Physically from where we are. however tempting it may be to wait until ‘the conditions are right,” until we move to another pace, until we get a new job, until we find more understanding, more congenial people, until . . .until . . .
The Grandfathers say “Start now.” Now is all we have, all we shall ever have. Start now.
Mentally, emotionally, psychically, many of us start from where Dante started on his Shamanic journey, in the depth of a dark and gloomy wood, filled with supernatural terrors and past chaos. It
is a place of great fear, “so bitter it goes nigh to death,” the poet says.
“Tant’ e amara che poco e piu morte. “Per una
selva oscura.” It is “through the terrifying experience of the dark wood that we find the way of return to innocence,”
that we find it. “The coming to consciousness is not a discovery of some new thing; it is a . . . return to that which has always been.”
Shamanic journey, it is essential to move through a wood, full of dangerous inimical forces, wild beasts and supernatural
Wendigos.
Dante looked up in his desperation. He caught a glimpse of the far-off mountain with a ray of sunshine above it and started to run forward with all his strength, but he was stopped by three
ferocious beasts barring the way, a leopard, a lion and a wolf, standing in their lower selves for Lust, Pride, Greed. We know these beasts and what they symbolize and how often encounter them
and how they bar our way until we meet them shining in the Happy Hunting Grounds of Paradise.
Dante had to turn his back to the mountain and travel in the seemingly opposite direction downward into hell and through it before he could see the mountain rising ahead of him again. So it is
with us.
Spiritually we start from that moment and that place where we decide to re-enter ourselves to the journey, to re-surrender our wills of the Great Source, to enlist with finality in the Company of
Light. Soon or later this great moment comes to us, but it must be with finality, total commitment, we hearted attempt to take a few hesitant steps on one of the ways leading to the Center, and
away from it. We must go forward firmly, as Dante did, or we may find ourselves again in the dark wood. Each time this happens it gets harder to resume the journey, and whether we go by Dante’s
way, on foot, or the Shamanic way “over wonderful slippery water” in a Shadow Canoe, resumption of the journey is what our spirits crave.
____ “The Shaman and the Medicine Wheel”____
__Evelyn Eaton__
PS: Please join me my Rainbow Body III Seminar at the beautiful Schloss Rastenberg from September 20-25, 2016