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Stop by on your travels. Rest your feet and take a deep breath. There are many more stories to be shared!
*Que exit music*
Some stories don’t require a translation. Some tales can satisfy your curiosity in the imagery itself. The story I am about to tell however, is one that asks that you be patient, and allow yourself to hang on every word:
As the story goes, the trip began with a motorcycle trip between North Africa and the North Cape. (Note: forgive the translation, all of these quotes were translated loosely from German, which is not my native tongue). Guenter Wamser explains that his horseback trek across the Americas was inspired by what he felt on his “Motorradodyssee”: “Disappointed about the impossibility of being able to capture a country in four weeks, grew in me the desire to someday take a journey of at least one year in duration. In 1986, I took leave of family and friends, from the regular salary of a secure existence. This was the beginning of a four-year Motorradodyssee in North and Central America.”
With that odyssey, Wamser discovered what it felt like to travel from a different perspective. He became fascinated by slow travel as he said, “It enabled me not only an eye for the spectacular scenery, but it opened me a different view of the magnificent details. I could now feel the country feel, grasp and comprehend.”
Guenter’s route through South America lasted five years, from 1994 to 1999. He trekked through Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. A companion, Barbara Kohmanns joined Guenter on the journey from Ecuador to Mexico. Throughout the South American route, the team was Guenter and Barbara, the dog Liesl and the horses: Rebelde, Gaucho, Maxie, Samurai and Pumuckl.
The route through Central America took the team of Guenter, Barbara, dog Liesl and horses through Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. This part of the journey stretched from 2001 to 2005.
Guenter wrote in his travel logs, “After 11 years and 20,000 km we finally reached Mexico. Each country smells different. But nowhere this impression was so strong as in Mexico. Mexico smelled like chili and fire, spirited life, like music. Mexico showed his picture book page: men with bright, wide-brimmed cowboy hats and trousers with oversized belt buckles. Mexico was the objective of the common journey of Barbara and me.”
Crossing the border, the route across the United States was taken following the Continental Divide Trail, the CDC, which runs from the Mexican to the Canadian border. This trail is the dividing line of the tributaries of the Pacific Ocean in the west and the Atlantic Ocean in the east.
“In June 2007, the journey on the 5000 km long hiking trail along the Rocky Mountains began. In summer 2009, we reached the Canadian border. Why it took so long? Because intervening unique, beautiful landscapes are waiting to be discovered. The journey is the destination, the slowness is the beauty of traveling.
The CDT led us through the high plains of New Mexico, and the Land of Enchantment (Tierra de Encanto), passing the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, through the lonely plains of Wyoming to the natural wonders of Yellowstone National Park and up into the rugged mountains of Montana.
Our four Mustangs we adopted from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) . These wild horses were trained as part of a social project, the Colorado Wild Horse Inmate Program . In the course of this project the inmates get vocational training in the taming of horses and can be easily integrated back into society after their release.
Since 1971, wild mustangs in the United States are legally protected (Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971) and its stock is controlled by the BLM… Each year a portion of the wild horses captured by the BLM and given up for adoption.”
During this part of the trip, a new team member joined and another departed. Barbara Kohmanns discontinued and Sonja Endlweber embarked on the route with Guenter. The team that crossed the Rocky Mountain route was made up of Guenter, Sonja and animals: the dog Leni and four Mustangs Rusty, Dino, Lightfoot and Azabache.
This part of the trip lasted from June 2007 to September 2009.
The last leg of the transcontinental horseback ride for Guenter and Sonja was started in the Spring of 2013 from the United States- Canada border to Alaska. Even after their epic trip on horseback is finished, Sonja, Guenter and Barbara continue to travel around Europe giving lectures and doing showings on their amazing adventure.
Getting a glimpse at their journey and the route they followed in crossing over continents with their horses, I feel a deep stirring in my soul. Something in me is waking up, stretching, and saying more loudly each day, your dreams are possible. You may be told you’re crazy, and that your dreams are unrealistic, but if crossing two continents on horseback in the span of twenty years is a reality for those who dared follow their dreams and do the work necessary to make it happen, then why on earth do we dare not live ours?
Click here to read more of the story of the transcontinental ride from South Patagonia to Alaska
This past Spring, while the birds and bees were out buzzing about, I was in a classroom taking an Anatomy and Physiology course. On a particular class, a licensed Acupuncturist, Herbalist and Medical Qigong practitioner came in to talk with us about Chinese Medicine theory, Western Medicine, Acupuncture, Herbology, Nutrition, and very importantly, “the birds and the bees.” In short, she questioned where we stand physiologically and mentally with our own sexuality. Bet you didn’t expect that to be brought up at an Anatomy and Physiology course. Well, neither did I…but it did turn out to be the greatest A&P class I’ve ever taken!
We gathered in a circle to share stories, and watched an enactment between practitioner and client, and seriously played with our wonderment at the birds and the bees. And more specifically, why do we culturally refer to sex as the birds and the bees?
Birds build nests to prepare for their offspring and bees are busy bumbling to all the pretty flowers in the neighborhood, spreading pollen so that plants can reproduce. The magical work of these animals is definitely overlooked if we only work with their nature when we’re educating about sex. Don’t get me wrong, sex is important for our well being physiologically and mentally when we share a healthy outlook on it. I joke around with my friends about the statistics you hear of young men who think about sex every ten seconds. I don’t joke about it in any way that would be shameful, but I just wonder, what if every ten seconds, boys were literally thinking about birds and bees? If this were our reality, I believe the awareness around colony collapse disorder and rapidly disappearing species would be spread around the world so fast, we would have a cure to save all the birds and the bees in one day.
Juliette de Bairacli levy has said, “where bees can live, man can live. With the bees disappearing, this is a warning. Man cannot exist without the bees.”
I recently came across a very special woman who likely thinks about the birds and the bees more often than anyone else; and has transformed her vision into magical, healing action. The woman’s name is Sophia Rose. She is the founder of La Abeja Herbs, which is Spanish for The Honeybee. Sophia is an herbalist, a nomad, an inspiration. This is her completely true story of how she came to find love in the honeybees:
La Abeja was borne out of the passionate devotional love I felt and continue to feel for Honeybees. In 2011 I was completing training and clinical residency at the North American Institute Of Medical Herbalism. At that time I was in the clinic seeing clients a couple days a week and in the midst of writing my thesis, the Magikal + Medicinal Uses of Solomon’s Plume. My greatest joy that year was gathering and crafting all of the wild medicines for the clinic’s apothecary. I felt as though I had truly found my calling. Up until that point in my life, I’d felt that my Soul’s Path had been fairly clear–I’d always known my next step, even if only vaguely. But as my graduation from NAIMH drew near, I felt totaly uncertain as to how I wanted to proceed, as an herbalist or otherwise. One evening, I was alone in my bedroom–high up in the Rocky Mountains–four months into the punishingly windy subzero Winter. I was watching Queen Of the Sun, a movie about colony collapse disorder and the implications of life without bees. I was suddenly overcome with a mix of grief and joy and fervor. Tears streamed from my eyes and I clutched at my breast, gasping. And while I was moved by the film, it wasn’t the reason for my tears. They were, rather, the result of my realization that I was meant to devote myself, totally, to the stewardship of Honeybees.
Photo Courtesy La Abeja Herbs
La Abeja Herbs is currently stewarding the growth and continuation of life for all in many unique places. I would joyfully travel to any one of these places Sophia Rose calls home to meet her and collaborate with the work of La Abeja Herbs. I hope we cross paths soon, though I can’t say where. Honeybees are so footloose, they can’t be pinned onto a map. Again, these are animals which hold up a radical mirror reflection of our own nature. It seems, most of us have forgotten what the birds and the bees really stand for: growth, regeneration, healing and interdependence with all life.
It’s time we listen closer to the softest and sweetest sounds of those creatures who we surely couldn’t live without. You can learn more about the work of La Abeja Herbs here. And you can find more information about how you can help the bees here.
Photo Courtesy La Abeja Herbs
For all of those things in your life that you delight in, and maybe don’t always remember to share your gratitude for having it in your life, thank the birds and the bees. What world would this be without them? What would we think about every ten seconds without them?
I have a question. I see it all around me. It shows up in my rear view mirror, and it even questions me while I’m listening to the radio. There is no avoiding it. And there absolutely no way I can pretend as if I already know the answer.
Are you curious? I’m sure curious how you’d answer this question:
This question may be a rendition of a Coldplay lyric, but I’m serious. I honestly don’t know. Many years ago, my friend and I were hanging out in our town’s downtown park and we came across a mutual friend with a companion we hadn’t met before. As we made introductions, the stranger asked what me and my friend were all about, and institutionally, my friend answered “animals.” We went on to exchange stories about our affection for animals, and the guy, who still didn’t know jack about us, chimed in saying, “Yeah, I feel so sad to see animals in cages, and how people keep all animals in zoos. They should all be left free-e-e, you know.”
It was a funny thing, because at that point something like instinct was triggered in my friend as she heatedly asked where his belief really came from. Because we all can agree that nobody likes seeing animals in cages, it doesn’t really mean that we can be brash and say we should set them free-e-e-e. Although rather unfortunately, in this encounter, we couldn’t all be nice, listen patiently and nod our heads in unison. Some surprising things were said. Like, “every time you drive a car, you’re killing an animal. Driving at 60 mph means you’re bound to hit and kill an innocent animal. We should outlaw driving!” And then someone said, “every time you take a step, you’re likely stomping on and killing an innocent, adorable bug. Does that mean that we should all stop walking?”
The debate raged on and on. Normally I love a good debate, but the problem with debates is that both sides only end up getting more entrenched in their own narrow perspective. And in this case, my friend and I were left with the memory of watching our friend of a friend march away in his wool sweater, with steam blowing out of his ears. And all I could say was, “if he is so worried about keeping animals in cages, I wonder why he likes wearing wool sweaters.” Oh well.
The more experience I have working with animals and learning from different people who work with animals for a living, the more I come to love this saying I heard a very modest horseman say:
And the more that I study the philosophies of different ancient medical traditions, I more I come to feel incredibly humble about the fact that I may not know much about complementary medicine, but I don’t know anything about anything else.
It seems that so many people want to be an expert in their field. Only they can’t decide what field to tap roots into, so they can grow to be an expert. It seems that so many people grow old without growing wiser. And it seems to me that there is a lot of intelligence out there, but not as much common sense. I never cease to be amazed. Just when I begin to think I know what is really going on…
I’m quite content to not know what I’m talking about. I’m really fine to let life’s processes remain in the feminine realm of intuition and deep transformation. Our senses are much more limited than other animals, like dogs’ whose sense of smell is ten thousand times more acute. Certain things are beyond our limitations of knowing or sensing. And that’s great news, really! None of us should feel responsible for being a master of the universe. And truly, all of the teachers I met who I would certainly call masters, don’t ever proclaim themselves to be. So what does that say?
If we’re a part of the cure, then we must not know it, but sense it like infrasonic rumbles beneath an elephant’s sensitive feet. If we’re a part of the disease, then we’re likely too busy causing harm to notice.
When we can get to this field, which is surely a place within us, I believe what Rumi meant is that we’ll find true connection and pure belonging. This is the place where animals live when they are free to take care of themselves and connect to nature. There is no doubt, although remember, I don’t know ****.
I think this is important to talk about, because if we have a feeling of where we belong, then we must be with our tribe. I am always seeking connection to nature and place, but a place feels like home when my tribe inhabits it. I can’t explain how it works, but I think the mystics do a pretty good job. I have faith in knowing, and I have faith in cultural traditions. But I feel like there is a disease running rampant in the many communities where the belief that the human mind has the unique ability out of all species to explain everything, is allowed to cement its’ tent stakes. And I do consider one of my most beloved writers, Elizabeth Gilbert, to be a true mystic when she says,
There’s a reason we refer to “leaps of faith” – because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don’t care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn’t. If faith were rational, it wouldn’t be – by definition – faith.
Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be… a prudent insurance policy.
Photo Courtesy La Abeja Herbs
When you cross that threshold, you’ll see very clearly what side you’re a part of. Whether you live in the dark and gaze at the sun, or you live in the light and gaze at the moon, you are living on the great divide. And what you need is not a prudent insurance policy, but a faith in your own courageous act of humanity.
I first heard the term Nomadic Pastoralist in a book about horse behavior and their herd dynamics. The book was called, Power of the Herd by Linda Kohanov. In so few words, Kohanov gave me the most serious case of Deja Vu I’ve ever had. And every time I would open the book to continue reading, coincidentally, (or not!) the book fell open to the exact same page in which she introduces the nomadic pastoralists. 
Reading about their culture is like reliving a dream I once had. Ever since learning of their existence, I’ve devoured every shred of research I can find which relates to them as if I’m reminiscing my very distant family. In an interview in The Sun Magazine by Leath Tonino, Jack Turner said of his past,
In the mid-1970s I was an assistant philosophy professor at the University of Illinois. I was about thirty years old. I was very unhappy. One day I went to the Lincoln Park Zoo to sneak some meat to the snow leopards, as I did on occasion. It was a crappy day, cloudy and dim and snowing, and I thought to myself: I’m as trapped as these wild cats. I decided that I didn’t want to live my life working indoors. Since then, I’ve worked inside — a forty-hour-a-week, punch-the-time-clock type of job — for only two and a half years total. The rest of the time I’ve been working outside or writing in my cabin.
Turner began living the dream once he changed course and lived in a way that would fulfill his compass’ direction, that was always guiding him outside towards mountains and wilderness, and always guiding him inside to his cabin and his spirit.
We are all connected to the same hub of very ancient culture like the individual spokes on a wheel. Philip Shepherd said, “If you go back to the Indo-European roots of the English language, which date from the Neolithic, you find that the word for the hub of a wheel came from the word for navel.” The most tapped in roots of our inherited physical body are still joined with a very ancient culture of humans who we can strongly relate to in our guts even if we don’t see any resemblance. 
To learn about ancient cultures is to brush off the dust on the mirror that reflects the deepest part of our ourselves. As the Buddhists say: “What happens upstream floats downstream.” In The Power of the Herd, Linda Kohanov explains in amazing detail, the history of a culture we have long forgotten about; a culture that embodied the sacred connection between humans and animals:
Nomadic Pastoralism, contrary to popular belief, was not a primitive condition. It was a specialization that developed out of settled farming communities requiring horses and skillful riding techniques. It required the wheel to allow populations to migrate with their herds by cart and wagon, leaders able to make quick decisions in an emergency, and a variety of craftsmen and specialists, far more than family subsistence farming did. The early horse tribes even managed to raise crops without becoming enslaved by them. They simply planted wheat in patches of fertile soil and returned to reap the benefits during seasonal migrations.
Recent archeological findings also suggest that women were equal to men in many of these tribes. Skeletons of warriors at first thought to be young boys later proved to be female. Over time, it was estimated that nearly 25 percent of warrior graves contained women dressed for battle, some of them obviously bowlegged from years spent on the back of a horse. Yet these wild-riding ladies mythologized as Amazons by the Greeks, were no less aware of their femininity. Their graves are filled with mirrors, scent bottles, and cosmetics of various colors. And like many women today, they loved to groom their horses. In burial mounds across Ukraine and Russia, up toward Tuva and the Altai Mountains, human and equine corpses lay side by side among a dazzling array of colorful saddle cloths depicting scenes from daily life. These in turn reveals a culture of decorative mane dressing and fantastic crested horse masks. Four-legged members of the tribe were dressed with as much enthusiasm as their two-legged counterparts…
Most impressive, however, are reports of the nomads’ behavior in battle, descriptions that have little in common with standardized legends of fierce barbarians out to vanquish the sacred innovations of the civilized world. Around 450 BCE, Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” wrote about a curious, highly frustrating encounter that King Darius I of Persia had with these tribes before deciding to take on a much easier project and invade Greece. Darius was chasing a group of Scythians who’d either attacked or offended him in some way, and he was apparently planning to punish them, for good. Gathering his troops together, he entered Eurasia for the first time in 512 BCE, but when he arrived at the edge of the steppes, none of his officers could figure out how to engage these so-called primitives in combat. Whenever the troops got too close, the Scythians simply dispersed, riding into the grasslands, leading the king’s rigidly disciplined military force farther and farther into the wilderness. The scythians were sleeping on horseback, drinking mare’s milk and playing games along the way, while Darius’s men were growing weak from starvation and exposure. Finally, the Persians were forced to turn around and march home as the Scythians cheered and chuckled in the distance. The horse tribes maintained their culture and their territory by acting like the horses they rode. Choosing flight over fight was not a cowardly act but an obvious, thoroughly natural way to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. The enemy was ultimately irrelevant because there were no cities to defend. Warrior riders of both sexes led the challengers away from women with young children and mares with foals (who were mobile, but undoubtedly slower). It was only when increasingly materialistic members of these tribes began trading profusely with city dwellers that they sacrificed centuries of freedom. The more possessions they craved and acquired, the more their belongings weighed them down, and the more sedentary they became. Greek gold and wine and decorative vases eventually lured the nomads into a gilded cage of cultural amnesia. The ones who refused to forget fled farther into the grasslands until civilizations developing to the east and west expanded and overlapped right over their graves.
The assumption that nomads were more violent than their “civilized” counterparts has begun to evaporate in light of new research. The Danish archaeologist Klavs Randsborg insists it wasn’t marauding hordes of barbarians that led to the fall of the Greco-Roman world. Rather, these societies destroyed their environment and, in desparation, moved out to incorporate the lands and cultures nearby – Celtic, Germanic, Thracian, Scythian – “which until then had led an effective and long-standing existence in harmony with nature.” Citizens of early cities were suffering from anxieties derived from the instability resulting from conspicuous consumption and unchecked population growth. Their only choice was to expand outward, taking over the territories of other peoples and transforming them into the slave labor needed to build new buildings and reap greater harvests. Randsborg and his colleagues insist that, after nearly a millennium of expansion to compensate for repeated economic failure, this process had borught city dwellers to the point at which they had devastated the whole natural and political world around them.
The greatest way to let go of ancient history is to embrace it, in the present.
Posted in Animal Guided Education, Wild Horse Ecology
Tagged ancient history, animal behavior, culture, deja vu, harmony, horses, human nature, nomad, tribes, wildness
In the Ayurvedic clinical program, during the body work portion of class we practiced massage on everyone in class. Since we had about 28 people in our class, each massage wound up being worked by five to seven people. That is ten to fourteen hands on each body. Suffice to say, it was perhaps the best massage of my life. I felt nourished, held, witnessed and not judged or pushed past my boundaries in any way. It was lovely. Mid-way through the massage, as my tissues were all warmed up and ready for deeper work, I erupted into laughter. Yes, what a great way to release! However then, suddenly my breath caught and my giggles stopped cold. Tears then started streaming down my cheeks and my breathing labored. The strokes slowed and became simple, sweet rocking. I wondered about containing my tears, but I didn’t see that as being appropriate. After all, my release was the affect of having bottled and sealed up many difficult emotions that I didn’t want to feel. So I just let go. And when I did, a voice rang loud and clear in my head. That voice said, I don’t want to be here.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be “here”, being worked on and held with assurance and trust by so many talented, trustworthy practitioners. I definitely wanted to be there! But the voice I heard came from a much deeper place. It was speaking from a sincerely scared place. My reaction to this voice was sadness, because I knew it spoke the truth. But I didn’t want to feel that way anymore. Instead, I wanted to honor the scared, sad voice I heard that day, by convincing it to want to be here. From then on I told myself each day, and many times a day, like a lovers reassurance at every goodbye saying I love you, that I was so happy to be here. And what do you know, I soon became very happy to be here. On this planet. In this home. In my body. The reason I share this story with you is because I recently came across an article from The Sun Magazine, April 2013, Issue 448, that read like someone came to speak for me. And I can’t get it across any better than the original writers. The article is an interview of Philip Shepherd by Amnon Buchbinder. So here you go, I hope you’re happy to be here too.
Buchbinder: You’ve said that we have a misguided cultural story about what it means to be human. What does that story tell us?
Shepherd: It tells us that the head should be in charge, because it knows the answers, and the body is little more than a vehicle for transporting the head to its next engagement. It tells us thatdoing is the primary value, while being is secondary. It shapes our perceptions, actions, and experiences of life. It separates us from the sensations of the body and alienates us from the world. And there is no escaping this story; it’s embedded in our language, our architecture, our customs, and our hierarchies. It’s like the ocean, and we are like fish who swim in it and barely notice it because we’ve lived with it since infancy. By interpreting reality for us, stories frame and give meaning to our actions. But there’s a danger to living by a story that you can’t question, because you start to mistake the story for reality. And that’s where my work starts — in formulating questions that can expose that story and hold it to account.
Buchbinder: Where did this story come from?
Shepherd: It dates back to the Neolithic Revolution, which was underway in most of Europe by 6,000 BC and gave us a new way of living: agriculture, permanent settlements, domesticated animals. We started taking charge of our environment. When you domesticate an animal, you become like a god to it. You determine with whom it will mate, and you own its babies. You choose what it will eat and when. And you determine the moment of its death. So at the start of the Neolithic Era humankind was radically altering its relationship with the world. The unforeseen consequence of that, which our culture hasn’t yet begun to appreciate, is that we also began to take control of the self in ways that created within us the same divisions we were creating in our relationship with the world. If you go back to the Indo-European roots of the English language, which date from the Neolithic, you find that the word for the hub of a wheel came from the word for navel. The hub is the center around which the wheel revolves. The metaphor suggests that the center of the self was located in the belly. The idea of being centered in the belly shows up in many cultures — Incan, Maya. There is a Chinese word for belly that means “mind palace.” Japanese culture rests on a foundation of hara, which means “belly” and represents the seat of understanding. The Japanese have a host of expressions that use hara where we use head. We say, “He’s hotheaded.” They say, “His belly rises easily.” We say, “He has a good head on his shoulders.” They say, “He has a well-developed belly.”
Buchbinder: This isn’t just a semantic issue, is it?
Shepherd: No, it’s deeper. These cultural differences point out that we have lost some choice in how we experience ourselves. Our culture doesn’t recognize that hub in the belly, and most of us don’t trust it enough to come to rest there. Our story insists that our thinking happens exclusively in the head. And so we are stuck in the cranium, unable to open the door to the body and join its thinking. The best we can do is put our ear to the imaginary wall separating us from it and “listen to the body,” a phrase that means well but actually keeps us in the head, gathering information from the outside. But the body is not outside. The body is you. We are missing the experience of our own being. To get a sense of what we have lost, it helps to appreciate the forces that carried us into the head. The Neolithic Revolution spawned two major changes in our story: the experiential center of the self, which had been located in the belly, began to migrate upward to the head; and the spiritual center of our culture began to migrate from the earth goddess up to the sky god. In mythological ways of thinking, the body and the world of nature generally are associated with the feminine, while the head and the realm of abstract ideas are associated with the masculine. By around 700 bc, we find the Greek poet Homer making frequent use of the word phren, which translates as both “mind” and “diaphragm.” So by Homer’s day the migration of our thinking was about halfway to the head, balanced between male and female. Some rich developments came out of that ancient Greek culture: the birth of Western science, philosophy, literature, theater. But by 350 bc or so the philosopher Plato locates the center of our thinking in the head. In his dialogue Timaeus the title character explains that the gods made us by fashioning the soul into a divine sphere, the cranium, and then gave it a vehicle, the body, to carry it around. So the head has the spark of divinity, and the body is a machine. That’s been our metaphor ever since. Our culture has been intolerant of attempts to reclaim this lost center of consciousness. In the early 1900s a Chicago anatomist named Byron Robinson wrote a book called The Abdominal and Pelvic Brain in which he describes the neurology of an independent brain in the gut. His work was quickly forgotten — it had no relevance to our cultural story. Then, in the late 1920s, Johannis Langley mapped out the autonomic nervous system. He said there were three divisions: the sympathetic, the parasympathetic, and the enteric. The enteric nervous system, which governs the gastrointestinal functions, is exactly what Robinson called the “abdominal brain.” Langley’s book became a classic, but the enteric nervous system was widely ignored, and students were taught that the autonomic nervous system has just two divisions. Finally, in the 1960s, Dr. Michael Gershon rediscovered the brain in the gut. In his book The Second Brain he describes how it took him fifteen years of presenting his research and answering refutations before his fellow neuroscientists capitulated and agreed that the neuromass in the belly is indeed an independent brain. [Gershon is a professor of pathology and cell biology at ColumbiaUniversity. — Ed.] Robinson, who first discovered the pelvic brain, was much freer in his assessment of its importance than scientists are today. He talked about it as the “center of life.” I completely agree with that. It is the center of one’s being.
Buchbinder: How does it meet the criteria for being a brain?
Shepherd: We shouldn’t imagine it as a lump of gray matter. The enteric brain is a web of neurons lining the gut. But it perceives, thinks, learns, decides, acts, and remembers all on its own. You can sever the vagus nerve, which is the main conduit between the two brains, and the brain in the gut just carries on doing its job. So they are both brains, but they are radically different. The enteric brain exists as a network that suffuses the viscera as a whole — which mirrors the way the female aspect of our consciousness feels the world around us as a whole, enabling us to exist in the present. The cranial brain, by contrast, is enclosed in the skull. And that mirrors the way the male aspect of our consciousness can separate itself from the world and create a subject-object relationship, enabling us to think abstractly. These two ways of engaging our intelligence reveal two different versions of the same world.
Buchbinder: Why bring “male” and “female” into it? Why associate “doing” with the male and “being” with the female?
Shepherd: The terms are imperfect, certainly, because people will tend to hear “men” and “women” — but I’m not talking about men and women. I’m talking about the complementary opposites that exist in each of us. Whether you are a man or a woman, there is both a masculine aspect to your consciousness and a feminine aspect. To come into wholeness is to realize the indivisible unity of these parts. At this point in our culture the male aspect has eclipsed the female aspect. I see this in both men and women. We have been taught to mistrust our bodies, to mistrust our intuition, to mistrust any information that is not analytical. This head-based, masculine perspective gives rise to three serious misunderstandings that drive our culture: we misunderstand what intelligence is, what information is, and what thinking is. Take our understanding of intelligence. We think it’s the ability to reason in an abstract fashion, something you can measure with an IQ test. So we remain blind to the impotence of reason in areas of vital concern to us. You cannot reason your way into being present. You cannot reason your way into love. You cannot reason your way into fulfillment. If you wish to be present, you need to submit to the present, and suddenly you find yourself at one with it. You submit to love. There’s that great quote from the Persian mystic Rumi: “Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Buchbinder: If intelligence isn’t abstract reasoning, what is it?
Shepherd: It’s sensitivity — specifically a grounded sensitivity, because a reactive sensitivity isn’t able to integrate information. A sensitivity to music, to the flight of a swallow, to arithmetic relationship, to a child’s tears — all of these are forms of intelligence. And your sensitivity isn’t a static, permanent condition. Anything that increases it increases your ability to live more intelligently. Conversely, the constant noise and distractions of modern life have the opposite effect. The jackhammer you walk past on the street diminishes your intelligence by blunting your sensitivity.
Buchbinder: If this focus on the head began in the Neolithic, are you saying that we need to go back to the Mesolithic? What if the rise of consciousness to the cranial brain was an important part of our development as humans?
Shepherd: Our task at this point isn’t to go back. It’s not a matter of giving up the ability to think consciously or abstractly; it’s a matter of coordinating the two brains. Picture the first astronaut who went into orbit and took a photo of our planet. He brought that unprecedented perspective back home and showed it to people. Suddenly they were newly sensitized to what it means to be a citizen of the planet. They became slightly more intelligent about their relationship with it. I think that new sensitivity contributed to the range of environmental initiatives, such as the Earth Day movement and Friends of the Earth, that sprang forth in the years following that first photo of the earth from space. That story of the astronaut stands as a metaphor for the evolution of our consciousness, but we are only halfway through the journey. We have left our home in the belly and are now “in orbit” in the head, viewing the world from a new, somewhat remote vantage point. Just as the astronaut gains perspective by separating from the earth, we gain perspective by stepping back from the body, separating our consciousness from its sensations and dulling our awareness of them. The problem is, we don’t know how to bring those perspectives back home so they can be integrated. Without that integration our abstract perspectives can’t sensitize us to the world. They merely abet our ability to assert control over it. Our culture has a tacit assumption that if we can just gather enough information on ourselves and our world, it will add up to a whole. But when you stand back to look at something, there are always details that are hidden from you. The integration of multiple perspectives into a whole can happen only when, like the astronaut bringing the photo back to earth, we bring this information back to our pelvic bowl, back to the ground of our being, back to the integrating genius of the female consciousness. The pelvic bowl is the original beggar’s bowl: it receives the gifts of the world — of the male perspective — and it integrates them. As you bring ideas down to the belly and let them settle there, they sensitize you to who you are and eventually give birth to insight. Our task is to learn to trust that process. The central theme of my work is that our relationship with the body shapes our perceptions, which in turn direct the actions we take and guide the theories we generate. The atomic theory began as a philosophical concept that was first expounded by Democritus around the same time Plato declared the head to be the soul’s container and the body its vehicle. Having individuated ourselves from the world, we saw a reality made of individuated bits, a shattered universe of random pieces that have no real relationship with each other. And we still see it that way, because we live in the head. But that’s an alienating impoverishment of reality. Quantum mechanics has revealed that not even an electron exists as an individuated bit. It exists as part of a web of relationships. Our relationship with the body has similarly affected our politics, our corporate culture, our language, our cultural values — all of human history. Language tells us explicitly that the head should rule. You’d better have a good head on your shoulders. You need to get ahead. The bosses work in corporate headquarters and head up committees. Chief, captain, and capital all come from the Latin word for head, so Washington, DC, is literally the “head” of the U.S. We call the pope the “head” of the Roman Catholic Church. We could call him the “heart” of the Church, to emphasize that it’s an institution based on faith. Or we could call him the “lungs” of the Church, because spirit means “breath.” The Church might look to its original model, Jesus, who did not live from the head. Instead it’s organized as a top-down tyranny, with the pope as its “head.”
You can read more of The Sun here or subscribe at The Sun Magazine, here. The Sun is, after all one of the many reasons we ought to be so happy to be here.
Just a few days ago, three new mustangs arrived from the BLM at Windhorse Ranch. Two of them were born in the wild, a ten year old Carter mare and a two year old gelding. The youngest of the horses, a stunning and curious grey one year-old filly, was born at the short-term holding set up by the BLM for horses who are en route to be adopted out. The yearling was especially curious about humans; that is, at least she wasn’t shaking and terrified anytime they come around like the ten year old mare who was born wild.
Horses who are born wild have very good reason to shake and quiver whenever humans come around. After being chased for miles by helicopters and then torn from their families in the chaos of transitioning into captivity under rough human hands, they are completely justified to fear the sound of our footsteps. This yearling, in a way, is a lucky one. She has no idea what she is missing having been born in captivity. She doesn’t have to be held captive by the maddening yearning to get back home or return to freedom, right? She should have no reason to wonder, why am I here? En yet, I’d still understand if she did, because I find myself madly wondering, why are we rounding them up?
With some earnest research into the motives for the BLM roundups of wild horses and burros, I have come to better understand the pain and loss I see in the eyes of newly rounded up horses who arrive at our ranch. The motivation to tear native horses from their homeland and put them into captivity stems from a purely corrupted mentality and approach to tending the public lands, which of course, is money and industry driven. The consequences of this are farther reaching than can be directly seen. However, we can imagine the implications if we only look no farther than history. The settling of the West and the forced displacement of indigenous peoples onto reservations that happened in a larger sense, not so long ago, have caused so many rich and important cultural traditions and knowledge to be lost. Even as activism for indigenous peoples is raising attention to remembering and honoring these rich practices and their way of life, what was torn from them may be irretrievable.
There is no going back. We can learn from the past, but it no longer exists. We can strive for a better day tomorrow, but surely tomorrow never comes. All that we have is this moment to right injustice as we see it. But what justice can be brought when the system that oppresses that which you hold so dear, oppresses you in affect? There is surely a larger root to this problem, but understand that if we do not deal with what debris that is on the surface first, we will have no clear pathway to get to the more deeply seated imbalances.
Sometimes it seems our power has been taken from us. We may feel our freedom has been captivated for long-term holding in a place with our name reserved on it. But who has the power to take that which only we are in control of? No one. We may be subject to fate, destiny, reincarnation, karma and whatever else this crazy world has in store for us, but I believe only we have the power to free ourselves, or lock ourselves away. It makes me weary to see so many wild animals held captive from their freedom, as if they no longer have the choice to pick the road they want to walk. But the perception that we can take away this freedom is an illusion we’d better wake up from. We are fools to think we can take another being’s power. Why should we test this in the first place when it only creates trauma that might not heal in this lifetime, for humans and animals. However fortunately despite all of the trauma that has been inflicted, if wild animals have learned anything from wildlands, they have learned how to persevere.
Photo by Alexandra Valenti
It is a fight, it is vulnerable issue, and wild horses and burros are dependent on us now to reserve their freedom. But they are patient with us, and they can hold unconditional love for you if you learn to work with them with respect and patience. Humans have always been interdependent on animals and wildlife, so what has changed today when we jeopardize the livelihood of wild animals in their native lands, is we are forcing ourselves to look at a very grim reflection of ourselves. Through the history of civilization, we have worked very hard and broken our backs to tame what remains wild in us. We may think we have lost our freedom and wildness, or that we are somehow wholly civilized, but I bet any one of us can testify to knowing of some influential people held in high esteem who are not always so civilized.
I have a proposition for the people of our culture. I invite you to look in your heart to find something you care deeply about. Something you worship or hold in awe. Something you would kill for. Something that makes you passionate about your life. When you find this in your heart, I want you to imagine that somebody walks up to you says, “Tomorrow you will lose all memory of this thing that you love so deeply. However, you can remedy this. If you want to keep your memory of your heart’s dearly beloved, you must take away its freedom of will, so that it can stay in your heart. If you let it’s will remain free, then it will forever be gone from you.” What would you do?
I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying, if you love something, give it away. I can admit, I’ve been dumbfounded by this saying until I have come to understand it in this way: if you love something, you will work to preserve its freedom as if it is your own. It becomes unimportant whether the subject of your love will stay with you or not, because you would rather have it be free to live the life it intends than be tied down by your relationship together. Of course in affect, when the thing you love so much comes to find that you hold the importance of preserving their freedom over the importance of maintaining a relationship with them, they choose to stay in relationship with you. Why?
This kind of love, my friend, creates a relationship that is interdependent rather than codependent. If you study the science of life, you’ll discover the interdependence of humans on animals and animals on plants and plants on the elements and on and on. But I hold that interdependence is the action of freeing, and empowering and holding in reverence both individuals. When you have an interdependent relationship with those individuals you hold close in your heart, you don’t need to lose them to love them. All you need to do is empower them, revere them and remind them that they are wild and free to be who they choose.
Resources for more information on the plight of wild horses:
American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign – http://wildhorsepreservation.org/
Return to Freedom Wild Horse Sanctuary – http://www.returntofreedom.org/
Bureau of Land Management Release on Wild Horse Roundups – http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/whbprogram/history_and_facts/myths_and_facts.html
American Mustang the Movie – http://www.americanmustangthemovie.com/
Posted in Animal Guided Education, Wild Horse Ecology
Tagged advocacy, belonging, BLM, domestication, horse behavior, love, preservation, ranching, relationships, roundups, wild horses, wildness
Do we dream to escape or to become more fully realized? Or both?
Photo Courtesy La Abeja Herbs
When stress signals the body to react, do we fight, flight, or catch the signal in crossfire and take deep breaths? How do animals react to stress in their bodies? These are all questions to be mindful of in your life and in the lives of animals you relate to. If we can catch breath of the stresses going on in our bodies, we can formulate a routine and pathway to release them so they don’t go on to cause suffering. When I was young and stress fired my sympathetic nervous system, instead of releasing it any old way I developed a highly specialized therapeutic approach: running with dogs and racing with horses under the big fading sky around dusk time. These therapeutic romp sessions with animals always made me laugh and breathe so deeply with joy that every worry in the world would disintegrate beneath my feet.
During the most trying time of my life when I was faced with a lot of pain hurting those around me, I was fortunate enough to be able to escape with animals. As long as I couldn’t stop what wanted to happen from happening, I learned from animals how to follow the path of least resistance. Animals have a unique ability to sit with pain without having to let it become suffering.
Suffering manifests in so many ways that we could dutifully spend our entire lives studying every root cause of its manifestation and working to prevent it in any capacity. I like Ayurvedic medicine and philosophy so much because it teaches that no matter what suffering exists. It’s one of the Four Noble Truths. Can’t deny that, so might as well come to learn how to deal with it! Accepting its existence, we can learn to dig its roots out of the terrain we walk on. And better yet, we can learn to run light as a feather over the terrain that guides our path, regardless of the suffering that exists in it…with animals guiding us safely.
No rights to picture
Catching your second wind is what I equate to holding onto inspiration, a natural protection for us against stress. So long as we are inspired and our fires are stoked, we can release and manage stress in productive and therapeutic ways. Our level of inspiration and motivation changes naturally every day like high and low tide, making something as simple as staying inspired seem like damned never ending work. A wise old saying goes, if you love the work you do, you’ll never have to work another day of your life. For many of the people I know, this saying is a punch in the nose because they know while they don’t love their work, they can’t just quit. So what then? Well, to begin with, if we want to maintain a blissful amount of inspiration in our lives we have to look at our perspective of love and work. The only pain in this old saying is that people don’t think that love and work are interrelated. They see pleasure as the winning lottery ticket and work as they price you’ve got to pay to stay hopeful even when you’re only buying losing tickets. They think their passion is dependent on them working hard enough to earn the time off or the better living wage to pursue it. But what if we started looking at pleasure differently? Imagine that pleasure is a beautiful woman with a bored mind and work is an average man whose mind is on fire with passion. Maybe, just maybe pleasure and work are two imperfect beings made to come together to become one harmonious creation.
The way animals see it, pleasure is in the running like mad to catch prey, pleasure is in the resting and ruminating, and pleasure is in the learning from members of the herd or pack. The way humans see it, work is in the running like mad to get to work on time, work is in the taking a lunch break because we wish we were at home making waffles, and work is in the lessons from teachers and professors, because we don’t understand why we can’t just study what we want to learn about. We’re burned out on working so hard and we’re too parched to be inspired by our jobs when even holding onto inspiration takes work to endure. My question is not, why do we work so hard and stress ourselves out, but rather why are we making work void of pleasure? When work meets pleasure, a slight breeze blows your way. And when this wind passes you by, let it fill you up and inhale deeply and ask yourself what do I want to create tomorrow?
Photo Courtesy La Abeja Herbs
Inspiration is passionate like an animal who loves you even though you keep them locked up for most of the day, en yet elusive because as soon as you open the gate, even if you’re holding the other end of the rope that’s tied to them, true inspiration will always run away with you. Better yet, inspiration is a brilliant tease, as it’ll only provide you with enough information as to where it’s taking you to get you to take the next leap of faith. And when you take this leap, it won’t be about working towards tomorrow, or feeling pleasure from the past.
Better yet, even if we’re just dreaming here, let’s imagine that whatever we want to create tomorrow is running towards us. Boom. Here’s even another old saying to top you off, what you are seeking is seeking you. Sounds like a Beatle’s lyric I know, but it only means that its time for pleasure and work to come together and produce a beautiful inspiration that will shine such radiant light upon your life that will make you think you’re a little girl running with dogs and racing on horseback. You will wonder if you’re dreaming, but then at least you will know we do not dream to run away, but to run into what is wanting to run into us.
Posted in Animal Guided Education, Healing
Tagged animals, dreams, healing, inspiration, intuition, medicine, natural medicine, nervous system, purpose, stress relieving, suffering
I rounded a bend in my perception of our relationships with animals when I started studying fiber and natural dyes.
Photo Courtesy La Abeja Herbs
My environmental science teacher encouraged me to find a mentor to help me learn the fiber arts, and ultimately helped me find the most best mentor I could ask for, who was a short distance from my home. This person is a huge influence in the fiber world, working locally to start a revolution that is spreading like wildfire across the country and the world. Her name is Rebecca Burgess, the founder of Fibershed. In high school, I had only wanted to learn to make clothes, but what I learned from Fibershed, the organization that is based in the bioregion where I was raised, ignited a much bigger wonder. Rebecca gave a lecture at my school and put in our hands a map of the producers, farmers, ranchers, designers and artisans within 150 miles of our home that were a part of the process of making our clothing. She handed us this map so we could use it to connect the dots of what it took to dress ourselves, however unfortunately most of our clothing we wear is stitched by a map that stretches at least 1000 miles from our home.
The more immersed I am in this map where the dots between fiber production, design and processing are close together, (within 150 miles of one another), the more I feel connected to the revolution of shepherding good ideas and good feelings. Brittany Cole Bush gave a presentation at the Fibershed Wool Symposium 2013 in Point Reyes that rejuvinated my understanding of where the potential in the Fibershed map really lies. I’ve attached a link to this map at the bottom of the post and encourage you to watch it, be entertained and inspired! To me, what Brittany spoke about, “Shepherding animals, people and projects” really boils down to the transformation of being able to see how the animals who produce raw fibers are cared for, getting to know the methods and perspectives of the people stewarding these animals, and getting a glimpse at the artistry behind crafting the finished clothing piece.
Brittany Cole Bush is a new generation of Shepherdess, working to “shepherd animals, people and projects” ~ http://www.brittanycolebush.com
This revolution reminds me that our obsession with wearing the right thing and shopping for a fresh new look isn’t honestly all about just looking good. What the revolution is really about is good feelings and nourishment, or feeling warm to the touch. And these feelings are not only gleaned by the end product of the fiber industry, but should be felt and seen through each step: the raising of animals, the sheering, the skirting, the spinning, the designing, and the processing and wearing.
FIbershed, changing the way we look at clothing ~ http://www.fibershed.com
Resources:
Videos from Fibershed’s 2013 Wool Symposium in Point Reyes ~ http://www.fibershed.com/wool-symposium-2013/live-stream/
I want to share every shred of happiness I feel in this world. The thing that has always enchanted me and driven me crazy about animals is that we cannot speak the same language. This truth I’ve always felt to … Continue reading
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