Speak For Me

I had an experience on the massage table when I first began my studies in Ayurveda. A strange, surprising, surreal experience that I will never forget.

Curious Prints

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.

Curious Prints

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.

Curious Prints

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.

Curious Prints

 

How Much Care It Takes

When learning a new language, any good teacher will stress the importance of immersing yourself in it. You can do this by surrounding yourself with fluent speakers who will aid your brain in truly taking in whatever new way of communicating you’re studying. This way, you’re not just learning it; you’re living it.

Photography and Art by The Lexicon of Sustainaibility

My absolute favorite source for immersing myself in the language of sustainability is The Lexicon of Sustainability. The photograph you see above was created by the Lexicon as a project to help students discover and reconnect with their local food systems called “Project Localize”. The project has been a huge success and continues to inspire students and teachers to take their knowledge into their collective community and strike a match for sustainable change in their local food production system. I urge you to sit down and take some time to browse the education that The Lexicon of Sustainability has made easily accessible through picturesque scenes translated into just-the-right-combination-of words and short documentary videos available on their website. Find the beauty here: http://www.lexiconofsustainability.com/

Photography and Art by The Lexicon of Sustainaibility

I’m especially excited by their work because many of the farmers, ranchers, lexicographers, artists and researchers happen to have roots near my native habitat. This means that when I gaze out on the land that holds my heart and that still holds many mysteries for my mind, I smile to imagine these caretakers making change happen right over the next hillside. And as the effect of their efforts ripples out, I’ll feel and see the change in my homeland. Their research is thorough and their practices are the product of trial and error and an earnest desire to preserve the health of this place for the next, (hopefully) more sustainable generation. Their work is multi-faceted and unique to their livelihood, and similarly compelled by the Ancient saying, we do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

Photography and Art by The Lexicon of Sustainaibility

So now that you know what awaits you at your fingertips, (as there is a true abundance of information on the language of sustainability once you decide its time to immerse yourself in it!) I’m going to change the subject, unfold a layer, or even be so bold as to pull on this thread and see where it’s connected to the rest of the world. Because frankly I can’t help but connect these random tangents that excite me back to the source that wells in my heart. Now, are you ready?

Here we go!

The one thing that all of these innovators, pioneers, and educators whose stories are shared on The Lexicon have in common is that they have dedicated themselves to undergoing an immersion in what makes their hearts beat and their minds race so that they can lead by example. The immersion I undergo in learning my beloved languages of Ayurveda and Animals is for one sole purpose: to learn to live it so I too can lead by example.

Photography and Art by The Lexicon of Sustainaibility

It is a simple lesson, but also a constant, difficult one: Those of us who want to change the world are told that we must first change ourselves. And those of us who stumble awkwardly and fall down constantly trying to be that change we want to see in the world then ask, (something like) “how did Ghandi make this look so easy?!” And the answer we receive is more often than not, “Why are you asking me? I don’t know. He was just being Ghandi.”  However soon enough we inevitably find that Ghandi, for instance, didn’t just speak the language of change with grace, but he lived it with all of its growing pains. Finally then, the story of free and easy living and saving the world is demystified as we find it’s time to let go of wishing we could only be Ghandi, for example, and decide to learn to live this language that speaks graceful truth.

And so the fun begins!

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in her groundbreaking novel Eat, Pray, Love  as she set out to change her relationship to pleasure, devotion, and balance in Italy, India and Bali:

 Destiny, I feel is also a relationship- a play between grace and willful self-effort. Half of it you have no control over, half of it is absolutely in your hands and your actions will show measurable consequences. Man is neither entirely a puppet of the gods, nor is he entirely a captain of his own destiny; he’s a little of both.

We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses – one foot is on the horse called “fate” the other on the horse called “free will”. And the question you have to ask everyday is, Which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it’s not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?

Our relationship to language and the way that we speak and live it, is one of our greatest tools for healing ourselves and realizing changes we pray for.  We can pray for change, happiness and peace in our lives and in the world, but as Gilbert writes, our free will and fate is a relationship and half of the job is ours. We will see change when we immerse ourselves in the language that speaks to our hearts longing for happiness and our minds love of the greatest mystery, peace. I can’t tell you what that language is specifically for you, but I do believe that fundamentally and at it’s very core, it will embody the practice of Sustainability.

Photography and Art by The Lexicon of Sustainaibility

Sustainability is the ability to continue a defined behavior indefinitely. And if you’ve never cared to learn the definition of the word sustainability before now, well then I assure you could still be living a sustainable life, only you aren’t an etymology geek like myself. I cared to learn the definition and see how it’s changed throughout history, because if it isn’t embarrassingly evident by now, I am really interested in the roots of languages and how they are used to sustain relationships.

There is one frustrating, stubborn and hot-headed aspect to language that I have a problem with however, and that is it’s ability to cause a real lack of communication. Think of political jargon, empty promises and manipulating framing. The reality of language is, some people use it to show how much they care and others use it to show how much they know. Those of us who use language, whatever dialect it may be, to talk our way into the hearts of those we want to help are using it as a tool to show how much we care. This style of communicating can build a strong bridge to someone’s heart that will make words, eventually, unnecessary. And the opposite style of communication, which is not specific to any one dialect, is the use of language as a tool to show how much you know. This kind of use of language is tricky, as if you aren’t careful to spearhead communication in conjunction with the language of how much you care, you will become increasingly more reliant on words. This form is often abused by people acting selfishly or without consideration for others.

It can be hard for some people to pick up what place others are communicating from if they aren’t aware of where they are coming from themselves. However, the intelligence and intuition of animals can always detect what place people are communicating from; genuine or ingenuine. When working with animals, communicating how much you know will get you absolutely nowhere, unless they know first how much you care. This is something I’ve learned from the great Horseman and teacher, Buck Brannaman.

The Lexicon of Sustainability connects the dots and builds a beautiful language based in sustainability studies that’s easy on the eyes ~ http://www.lexiconofsustainability.com

Learning to communicate from a genuine place of caring so that we can get across how much we know is the foundation of the language of sustainability. If we can come from these places in our interactions with all things, then whatever language we speak, we will be speaking our graceful truth. My teacher of Ayurveda, DeAnna Batdorff says that if we speak equally from our hearts and our minds, our voice will come together and always communicate graceful truth. Our voice is a gift, and we are responsible for taking great care in sharing it with the world.

How much care this takes, in immersing ourselves in the language of sustainability is dependent upon what our graceful truth is. You’re the only one who knows what it’s like to be in your body and live with your heart and your mind. All I can really say knowing my body and the way it communicates and relates to the world, is that if I want to sustain my feelings of happiness in my heart and peace in my mind, I need to be working with animals to play with grace and willful self-effort and utilizing diagnostic tools of Ayurveda to help myself find that balanced place of belonging in the world where there is a hole in the shape of me, and live there.

To simply conclude, I suppose that living in a sustainable way for me, requires as much care as I truly care to sustain.

Photo Courtesy The dhyana Center

The Ocean in Emotion

Ancient folklore describes the horse as being created from the ocean.

From Juliette de Bairacli Levy’s Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable, she writes “Legend tells that the horse, stallion and mare were created from the sea waves and emerged white as sea-foam…further legend from Greece tells of Chiron the centaur (half horse, half man) who, long ago, was so wise in knowledge of medicinal herbs that heroes and demi-gods went to him worshipfully to be his pupils.” If you’ve ever experienced the fortune of running with horses on the beach or in gentle waves, you may have already gotten the feeling that they belong on the seaside. Juliette, the famed grandmother of herbal medicine for animals who was one of the biggest influences in bringing herbal medicine to the states, writes that “the horse flourishes when raised by the sea or within reach of sea winds… and certainly benefits greatly from the addition to the daily food of iodine and general minerals-rich seaweed (of most types, though deep-sea kelp is the preferred one).”

The reason I write this is because, first of all I haven’t written in a while. And second, the reason is because of an ocean of emotions in my life that has me learning to breathe under water…again. While it seems most of my existence on this planet has been time spent around horses and their magnetic hearts, because that’s where I gravitate to now, in truth the first few years of my life were spent in the water. When I was young, I could swim better than I could run. I could say that by the first time I rode a horse I gave up my sea legs for the saddle, but I never really gave them up. Water is in my blood, not just in my physical body, but in my family tree. My Grandfather was a passionate fisherman and raised every one of his children by the sea. My Dad has likely spent the greater part of his life in water, whether surfing, diving for treasure or swimming just for the hell of it. And I amazingly enough got to grow up exploring California’s coast line with my father, in search for the perfect wave.

My family tree, if I was to illustrate it, would look like deep-sea kelp because we are inextricably linked to an ancient ocean of wisdom. We all learned to swim before we could walk. We, like horses thrive on sea breezes and make our roots close to the coast, our homes sprawling up and down the California and Baja California Coast. Knowing the roots and listening to the stories that are dug into the roots of my family tree warm me deeply. And when grieving needs to happen or when we let go of some of our losses, I believe we can ease our pain by looking to our oceans.

We all have an ocean within us, in Ayurveda it is related to the kidneys and our lymphatic system. One of my anatomy teachers goes as far to say that our bodies, as a whole, are one big ocean. Every one of our cells is bathed in water, and within every one of those cells there is more water. When we look deeply, we see that the macrocosm and microcosm of the environment to the body and the body to the internal environment keeps on scaling down until our microscopes can no longer scale down. Life, in its full field of vision is one amazing spiral which shows us time and again that what it outside of ourselves is within ourselves too.

Photo Courtesy La Abeja Herbs

During clinic this past week at the Ayurvedic healing center where I am working on my residency, the lead practitioner in my group was speaking to the importance of staying hydrated to begin to change anything in our health. They way she explained hydration has stayed with me, as she said that when our bodies are well hydrated and we are stressed, we are able to bend. But when we are dehydrated and we become stressed, we don’t just bend, we break. So what is the lesson here that the ocean, horses, our families and trees especially have to teach us? The lesson is wonderfully simple enough: when we take care of our oceans, (not just kidneys, lymphatic system but our WHOLE BODY) we will be better able to bend with stress, not break apart from it.

The Ancient’s may have believed that horses were created in the ocean, but I recently learned from a friend a new perspective on what it means to believe. Of course, no matter what we believe the truth will remain true, to believe could be seen sometimes as “being in the lie”. I cannot accept that to believe is to be caught in a lie, though sometimes it can be that stubborn beliefs can blind people to the real truth. I’m sure we’ve all come across what holding onto these kinds of belief can do. However, because my father is a fisherman I was raised on stories of what treasures and mysteries the ocean held, and see belief as an essential tool to have in our lives, (especially on the open sea). Each story my dad shared was incredible and unbelievable in its own way, but the lessons I caught onto in each story of the sea was that absence of belief in a story of shipwreck and encircling sharks may be the difference between life and death. As a fisherman, you may be taught emergency procedures and possess the knowledge of survival in such circumstances, but without a strong belief that you will survive, what will keep you looking for reassurances from lighthouses?

Our emotions are governed by the intuitive waters within ourselves. It’s been shown that we share with all living creatures in varying degrees these emotions, but I do believe that no one has ventured as far to say that all other creatures, in addition to having senses capable of feeling, are capable of belief. Whose to say something so daring anyway! Since belief in itself is a tool very similar to the mind in that we only know its existence because it tells us so. Therefore let me be as bold as to say that if belief works mysteriously in our process of making discoveries about ourselves, then other living creatures undoubtedly can believe, although maybe they have no use for it.

Since beliefs have the power to focus us on reassurances we are seeking, and blind us altogether if we are unwilling to give up that which no longer allows us to grow, I find it more useful myself to use beliefs only until they get me to a place of knowing. Indeed, knowledge can change and researchers and scientists discover new information all the time that changes the paradigm as we once knew it. However knowledge as a tool seems to me to be more flexible a structure than a belief as a system. The two are equally powerful when used properly and with finesse, however they can both trap us in shells if we aren’t careful to shed them once we are ripe to grow beyond them.

To clear this matter up requires some water. Where there is water, there is life, change, flow, growth and regeneration. Knowing and believing are tools that allow us to come to conclusions. But the truth is, no one cares what you believe or what you know until they know how much you care. To conclude, the best way to use knowledge and beliefs is to share them in such a way that demonstrates effectiveness and promotes experimentation. Find for yourself what is true. Let go to the deep tide that moves your stream of consciousness ever onward, keeping a healthy circulation going between knowing, believing and living so that your well of wisdom may never run dry. Strive for balance in your lifestyle, truth in your knowledge and forgiveness in your beliefs. As Sarah Crowell said and Sacred Ecology Films later wrote about, “The way we’ll hold it together is to hold it – together.”

Wild and Beautiful Medicine

I like to see magic all around me.

I was born and raised in Sonoma County in Northern California, a very magical place. My family transplanted itself here because my Dad was a Sea Urchin diver, and the market for Sea Urchins was booming in this region. Coming from a picturesque Southern California town, my Mom initially saw the place that would come to be my hometown and said, “I wouldn’t be caught dead living here.” Today, here we are caught dead living in a small bohemian town in Northern California, a short drive from the Ocean, the City and the Mountains; pinch me. Having lived here my whole life, sometimes I see this place as a sleep-inducing field of lotus’ and want so badly to wake up. Traveling to foreign places is surely a wake up call. The things I take for granted in this place are luxuries in other places. If for nothing else, we should travel to remain humble that life is a gift.  Sometimes I drive out to the Ocean and plunge into the cold salty depths nearly naked, and let my whole body become numb and I never feel more alive. And every chance I get I drive out to a horse ranch on top of a great hill where my two horses live and I run and muse about life with them. They are great listeners, but above all they are great communicators. I will share their stories, do not worry.

Animal as Medicine is a seed. It is years old in being dreamed, and still at this time I do not know what it will grow into, (though still, I dream). Looking back, it seems its creation began when my relationship with horses began. My journey with horses began when I was six, and finally at age eleven, I embarked on a deeply connected journey with a sweet mare called Jasmine. At the time my Mom had remarried and my Sisters and I moved to our new home in the country, which had a yard built to house horses. An utter fairytale. My hands have also cared for many wild horses, who have come into my life either as a companion for Jasmine or a teaching project for me, and have set wildfire to my dreams urging me to study in depth the true nature of horses and wild creatures.

I’ve heard a powerful healer say that we can believe what we want to believe, but the truth will always be the truth. Horses are a strong medicine for us; my favorite Ayurvedic herb that I use for regenerating the tissues and strengthen the reproductive system is Ashawaganda, literally meaning Strong like Horse. The incredible healer who taught me all about this herb, DeAnna Batdorff, is the reason why Animal as Medicine was rooted and given life through Ayurveda. I actually learned what Ashawaganda translated to mean at an introduction to Ayurveda class at the dhyana Center in the Summer of 2012. And right then and there, I gave up my plans and scholarship to study Natural Horsemanship at the University of Montana Western, and signed up to study in the Clinical Program in Ayurveda taught at the dhyana Center that Fall.

My life has been blessed with so many healing influences. I feel so deeply connected to the animals I take care of, my wild and beautiful friends and family, and Ayurveda as a lifestyle and a lifelong study, that I can’t honestly draw a line between where their influences end and mine begins. Of course, life is never without it’s trials and tests of character, and I hit walls and run into boundaries at times. Early this morning, my dear friend left a message for me to encourage me through a hard time I am facing and I want to share it with you in hopes that it may medicate your day too. I feel the need to share it not only with you but with all the animals around me. I always want to give them some sort of explanation as to why the whole process of domestication was beneficial to both the human and animal side of the equation, but I also feel they need now more than ever to be given permission to be wild again. It doesn’t mean that we will care for them any less than we do now, but that perhaps we will take better care because they will be in tune with who they truly are: wild beautiful creatures.

My wild and beautiful human friend spoke these words of advice that I love so much because they apply not only to me as she was intending, but to all the magical animals who I call medicine:

“I just want you to know that you can define yourself. It’s so important to support what you have, you’re so lucky to have family. But make sure that you nourish yourself and that you take care of yourself because after all what you’ve got is your own two feet, and your head and your beautiful mind. So don’t let your soul get mangled by what’s going on right now. Just stay grounded and be strong, because you are so much stronger than you might think you are. I know you can do this, I know you can get through it.” – A Wild and Beautiful Creature