Whatever residual belief I held of good and evil was smudged out last night by a dream where several people and I were being detained by a couple of smooth-operating thugs. They exuded such calm, slick professionalism that they didn’t need to level any threats or brandish any weapons to keep us quiet and sitting tight.
At the same time, they displayed a keen sense of rapport with each other. You could tell by their respectful demeanor that they held each other in regard. They exuded trust and a shared sense of purpose. When I woke up, a line from a Bob Dylan song came immediately to mind: To live outside the law you must be honest (from Absolutely Sweet Marie, on his 1966 Blonde on Blonde album).
In my dream, I had the training manual on ESP and other deep listening skills with me that I was reading the day before in awake time. Suspecting the outlaws would relate to the subject matter, I showed one of them the book. He was immediately intrigued.
I woke up from the dream and lay in bed for a while, basking in the feeling of deep kinship I experienced with those two men. There, under the umbrella of evil, I found a wealth of kindness and character, along with exemplary examples of personal empowerment.
My friend Craig’s six-year-old nephew didn’t like carrots and refused to eat them. One day he walked into the kitchen and asked Craig what he was snacking on. “Oh, this is special adult food,” he replied. “You’re too young for it—you’ll have to wait until you grow up to enjoy carrots.”
A while later, Craig was sitting in the living room and caught a glance of his nephew sneaking into the kitchen. Craig heard the fridge open and smiled. From that day on, carrots have been one of his nephew’s favorite foods.
My father did the same thing to me when I was child—only inadvertently—by forbidding me to play with a kid down the block whose family was poor. I just knew he had to be the most fascinating kid in the neighborhood. I used to do something similar with my dog, who hated orange peels. They became irresistible when I created a mock tussle for them—he’d gobble them down.
I see the phenomenon regularly played out in many aspects of life: cultural, economic, religious, even relational. An everyday item or relationship can be given premium value by creating an aura of scarcity around it. Thanks to our scarcity-based culture, we’ve become adept at creating forbidden fruit through advertising, hoarding, taboos, and belief systems.
Whatever distances or restricts us from something creates desire, and desire is far more powerful than need. And more costly: obsessions, addictive behaviors, chronic depression, and insurmountable debt.
If we were living in the natural world as hunter-gatherers, we’d be dwelling in a state of abundance rather than scarcity. When we wanted something, we would forage for it or create it, and any restrictions or limitations would be naturally occurring. Mine is a hybrid life, and I often chuckle at the resulting contradictions, such as $6 a pound organic grass-fed beef versus all the free premium grass-fed roadkill I could ever want. And that fancy bottled water… I don’t think I’ll ever drink my lake dry.
I know, not everyone can live the way I do. Even though there are ways around much artificially created scarcity, most of us will still end up being trapped in our supply-and-demand economy. I treat it as a game, cheating the devil when I can, winning fair-and-square when I’m able, and losing only by appearance. Someone can overvalue or devalue what really matters to me only if I buy into their system. They make it seductive—I need to be constantly vigilant. As long as I live from my heart and surround myself with people of heart, I do fine.
I once met a woman with long, dark hair who moved with a flowing grace. She revered Gandhi, listened to Andreas Vollenweider, and treated all beings with kindness. We found ourselves nodding in agreement so much we hardly had to talk. We were the perfect couple, and that first year together I thought we had returned to Eden.
And now for the fairytale ending—it turned out to be the most boring relationship I ever had. The conversation, the sex, even the meals, were so excruciatingly predictable that I felt like Bill Murray caught in his endless Groundhog Day time loop. I laughed at the fact that if irreconcilable differences were grounds for divorce—I was screaming to get out because of irreconcilable similarities. A marriage counselor’s bread-and-butter is resolving differences; who could I turn to? Everyone told me I had the relationship to die for; how could I make them understand that I was dying because of it? Living with my clone might have been fun for a while, and a stroke for my ego to boot; however, how long can one stand gawking at himself in a mirror?
I’ve come to learn that fertile ground comes not from all clay or all humus, but from the blending of many diverse elements. Resolving differences might create stability in a relationship, but along with it comes blandness. It may not be easy to live with diversity, but it’s impossible to live without it.
If I’m in my ego, I perceive differences as a threat. If I’m in my heart, differences sweep me out on my frontier, where I can be wowed by the unknown and tremble with exhilaration from the unexpected. Of course there is one hitch—isn’t that always the case? Living from the heart takes centeredness and trust, not to mention embracing perhaps the greatest fear: abandonment.
All those formula patch-’em-up-and-send-’em-home therapists and self-help books are doing us a tremendous disservice. If they could retool and help us honor diversity, I believe they could not only help us have loving relationships, but a loving world.
Experiencing physical pain is pretty much a given; experiencing emotional pain is optional. When pain receptors in the body are stimulated, we suffer, plain and simple. However, we are much more in control of our emotional reactions. The mind’s emotional responses are governed by a belief system, which we can consciously choose. Once installed, it becomes the mind’s de facto operating system.
To show how it works, imagine your son is joining the military. Now imagine your emotional response, which could be happy, distraught, or neutral, depending on your convictions or lack thereof. Now imagine someone showing interest in your lover. Perhaps you feel insanely jealous—a common response for people in our culture. Yet if you were a member of a native culture patterned after the gifting way, you might feel honored and glad to share.
Dealing with emotional pain directly is akin to taking aspirin for a headache: it might help you feel better, but the source of your comfort goes unaddressed. Fortunately, emotional pain can be greatly reduced, even eliminated, by going to its source and eliminating it. I’ve watched vegetarians who got sick at the smell of meat grow to savor it, and seemingly heartless soldiers become caring pacifists, simply by changing their belief systems.
The solution may be simple, but not necessarily the process. It most often takes time and tremendous dedication, although it could be miraculously quick. We like to think we are conscious beings, but the vast majority of what we feel, think, and do is just knee-jerk reactions. The usual evolution to a new belief system occurs not as a steady progression, but in fits and starts. The stronger your vision and supportive community, and the more trust you have in them, the faster your transformation. But no matter what the speed, the release from emotional bondage is truly a miracle.
It is commonly believed that feelings are either expressed, which is healthy, or repressed, which is unhealthy. As a child in a family where the expression of feelings was sometimes traumatic, even violent, I couldn’t buy into the belief. It was a matter of survival—I found safety in stuffing my feelings and insulating myself from the moods of others.
Yet I suffered. My introvertedness isolated me from friends and I dreamed of being part of a family where I could feel relaxed and be myself.
Several nights ago I had a dream that told me feelings are always spontaneously expressed. You can’t argue with dream, so I explored the possibility. Is the stereotypical stoic Indian or unflinching martyr showing feeling? Does one person have to perceive another’s feelings in order for them to qualify as being expressed? And what about the often-expressionless wolves in the pack I lived with, or me the hunter masking all intent and feeling when stalking my prey? I couldn’t imagine all of these people destined to lives plagued with ulcers or repression-fueled violent outbursts.
An image came to me of emotional energy being water that flows freely down a stream. A beaver dam impedes the flow and the water pools behind the dam. Lily pads float on its surface, water birds and fish find it a welcome home, and the beaver find it a safe haven by building their lodge out in the middle.
Only if I held on to the belief that water needs to flow in order to be expressive could I see the water behind the dam as stifled. My prey couldn’t read my emotional state, but another hunter could. The same with the stone-faced wolves: when I had an intuitive connection with them, their feelings came through loud and clear. For a few days now, I’ve been experimenting with the awareness that feelings are always spontaneously expressed. Already I notice my increased sensitivity to people’s moods, even though they give me no overt clues. I’m now open to the possibility I have created a monster by believing in stuffed feelings.
I live and work with a group of people who are very conscious of their effect upon others. They work at being nonjudgmental, refraining from gossip, and accepting others’ thoughts and feelings. Yet there is one odd little item that stretches their tolerance.
It started to show itself couple of weeks ago: so-and-so has poor form, so-and-so has her butt way up in the air…looks like a slinky worm…does them too fast. A little regression into tittle-tattling and judging was one thing, but then I overheard an unabashed comparison: “You should see so-and-so’s push-ups—that’s the way they should be done.”
Was there a sacred way of push-ups inscribed on a stone tablet that I was not aware of? Were my comrades members of a secret exercise cult? Or maybe we were just genetically programmed to execute push-ups in a certain way and I didn’t get my full quota of chromosomes.
After contemplating the issue on a (very brief) meditative retreat, I came to realize that my partners were probably still under the spell of their school days sports coaches, who indoctrinated them in the right way—The American Way—to warm up. You know, God, mom, apple pie, and proper push-ups.
I’m happy to report that my friends have joined Push-Uppers Anonymous. They come home from meetings all aglow, talking about how addiction to conventional push-ups can cause repetitive motion injury and asymmetrical muscle development. And get this: a couple of them have gone cold turkey—they’ve sworn off of garden-variety level ground push-ups forever. One of them has the shakes pretty bad, but he says he’ll be alright as long as he doesn’t run into his old coach.
On our training runs, you’ll now see the crew doing push-ups on hillsides, straddling logs, one hand forward, a leg out to the side. And yes, even butts up in the air. I know; you wonder what this country’s coming to. I think we’re good as long as we still have mom’s apple pie.
I encourage anyone who wants to turn his/her life around and get super healthy—physically and emotionally—to read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and Why We Run by Bernd Heinrich. Along with a new take on human evolution, you’ll learn why there is no substitute for running. Humans evolved as nomadic foragers, always moving, and we naturally stay in optimal health when we do what we are designed to do, the way we’re designed to do it.
The running style presented by McDougall and Heinrich is what we practice here at the Teaching Drum. Every other day, a group of us goes running off trail and through the woods, and we stay in great shape. One reason is that our “run” includes all the bending, twisting, and jumping necessary to go over, under, around and through whatever lies before us. When people ask what we’re up to, I tell them we’re off to do native yoga. Lately we’ve been throwing in push-ups, yesterday we each did 275.
Along with woods running, add a paleo diet, living water, clean air, and low stress, you might hardly recognize yourself after a few months. Even if you think you’re doing well now.
Some people are afraid to come running with us because they’ll incur injuries with light footwear on uneven terrain (we run in moccasins or similar). The truth is we fare much better than running shoe-clad road joggers, 70% of whom sustain injuries in any given year. During my road and trail running days, I ended up spending a total of two years on crutches due to several ankle and stress injuries. With my last injury, I went to a physical therapist to get fitted for an ankle brace. I thought he was joking when he suggested that I get out there and use the ankle as I normally would, only gently to start with. His reasoning was that the ankle, being used, would heal strong and in alignment with the way I used it. Additionally, I would not have to come back for physical therapy to strengthen the ankle or restore full motion.
I haven’t had another injury since I swore off of hard surfaces several years ago. Only I feel guilty for further weakening our economy by steering people away from damaging footwear and useless therapy.
Every day a woman elder followed the path down to the stream to get water, which she brought back in two rawhide buckets on the ends of a pole she carried across her shoulders. One of the buckets had a tear in it, while the other was perfect. By the time the woman made it back to her lodge, the torn bucket would be half empty.
Four turns of the seasons passed, and each day the perfect bucket grew more proud of himself for being able to deliver a full measure of water. “I am ashamed of myself,” said the torn bucket. “I am a failure—this tear in my side lets water leak out all the way back up the trail.”
The kind elder looked over to him, laid her hand upon his damaged, water-stained skin, and smiled. “Have you noticed all the herbs and flowers that now grow on the left side of the trail?” she said. “And look at the Mice and Birds and Butterflies who have come to live there. The right side of the trail is still dry and dusty. That’s because I have always carried you on the left—my gifting side—which is closest to my heart. Rather than seeing you as flawed and arriving half empty day after day, I saw you as half full and overflowing with generosity. You trusted, you shared your gift with your hoop of relations. In the way that giving is receiving, you have made room within yourself for the beauty and nourishment that has come from your gifting. And it is not only you, but the perfect bucket, and me, and so many others we cannot know, who have been bathed in your blessings.”
Popular forms of toning exercises, such as yoga and qigong, along with modern martial arts, are based on repetition and memorization of forms. The approach fits well with our civilized training to be mind-centered and lead repetitive task-based lives.
We are designed to function differently, as we evolved in the natural world, where nearly every movement is an adaptation to an ever-changing environment. Such movement does not originate in the mind, and we cannot rely upon memory to execute it. Rather, we must be in communion with the life around us and attuned to its collective consciousness. We are then able to remain centered and move in a coordinated fashion, ever observing and analyzing as we adapt and adjust like a bough to the breeze.
In such a state, we are fully alive—a functioning organ within an organism. We can carry on a continual dialogue with all that surrounds us. No longer just creatures trained to execute cause-and-effect responses, we begin to see new options presenting themselves. Looking around and through situations at hand, we can reformulate them and come up with creative solutions.
Even more importantly, we’ll find that situations will often evaporate. The energies at play are then freed of their structures and lose their identities, and we can align ourselves with them. We will then know the Zen—the essence—of all forms and movements.
I just did something dishonest—I helped organize a Wolf tracking class and got people from all over the country and Europe to register for it, only I didn’t tell them that all along, I had an ulterior motive.
It all started when I was in my 20s. I lived with a pack of Wolves, and they were my family. I felt closer to them than to the people in my life. Three times people threatened to kill every animal in the pack, and once a group of hunters showed up with rifles-in-hand to do it. Their children were at risk, they said, and the deer herd would be decimated.
The showdown resolved itself without a shot being fired, yet those men left me with a precious gift: they convinced me that the only effective way to change Wolf’s fate was by introducing the public to the real animal behind the big-bad-wolf image. Along with that, people needed to be educated on the vital ecological role Wolves and other apex predators played.
Now Wolves are returning to the Northwest and Southwest, along with regions in Europe, and they are meeting the same fierce resistance they once did here in Wisconsin. Poaching is an issue, just as it was here. A couple of high-profile court cases helped slow it down, but it was mostly changing attitudes that did it. Now our Wolves are doing resoundingly well—they’re moving into what was typically considered marginal territory, and they are thriving.
We who have a passion for wolves can play a helpful role in turning public opinion around. Here in Wisconsin, we now have 30 years of experience running a public relations program that has created an amenable-enough climate for Wolves and humans to coexist. One of our greatest successes is Wolf Awareness Week, a once-a-year-event where Wolf ecology is worked into the natural sciences classes of all primary and secondary schools. Two key figures in the Wisconsin PR program will be participating in the Wolf tracking class, which will offer a prime opportunity for participants to learn firsthand what has worked here and take it home with them.
There, I confessed—now I’ll be able to sleep tonight.
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