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How the Butter Spread: Why Expeditionary Learning Works

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This is more than a cute story. It shows the power of engaged learning! Pass it on!

Subhaga Crystal Bacon's avatarMVCS Kids

This is a story that I heard from one of our parents, but I loved it so much that I decided it was worth passing along.

Every Friday, our kids do a program called Locavores–it’s self explanatory. During the fall, as you will remember if you follow this blog, we did a lot of weekly food processing from things we had harvested locally: apples, pears, corn, squash, potatoes.  As we settle into winter, the food processing is also undergoing a change in season.  How do people preserve food to keep in the winter?  Our foodie teacher who has a lot of experience with cultured and fermented food did a short lesson last week on making butter.  In a way, it was a problematic lesson.  Nine kids, one mixer.  A lot of practice in patience and sharing!

But it turned out to be a phenomenally successful lesson, and here’s why.  The…

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Psychic Surgery

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For the last few years, I’ve been experiencing what, to work a metaphor, I’m going to call “symptoms” of a psychic wound from my childhood.  It’s a wound around sex and sexuality that has been deeply bound in psychic scar tissue.  This scar tissue has acted as a deadening agent, a protection from accidental re-injury or activation.  The last fifty years allowed a lot of scar tissue to accumulate, for the psychic body to develop a somatic relationship to the wound in which it has been as if asleep.

Then came awakening.  With awakening as consciousness came the slow awakening of many parts of myself, countless and previously unknown parts.  Some of these parts brought ecstatic enlightenment to my Being.  Some brought quiet joy. Others brought pain that radiated out from the essential wound of incarnation, of being in a body.  Some of these parts are small and mundane, others are large and consequential.

About two years after awakening as consciousness, I took a long and quite activating telecourse with Waking Down in Mutuality founder, Saniel Bonder called “Let’s Talk Sex.”  For me, the course opened the door to the way sex and sexuality have been shadow parts of my Being, parts that are acting on me without my awareness.  My Trillium Awakening teacher Sandra Glickman has said “we are governed by what we can’t see.”  How true that is.

I’ve often used the metaphor of a splinter in talking about psychic woundedness.  It’s as if early life events, conditions and patterns lodge in our Being, some of them quite deeply, and once their trajectory inward stops, and they come to rest, they begin a trajectory in the other direction, back out toward light propelled by the body’s psychic antibodies that form a pocket of pus around them, sometimes with swelling, irritation and pain until they work their way up to the surface level where they can potentially be removed.  Sometimes they shoot out on their own accord, like a birth.  Even if they come out on their own, they leave a trace of their passing, a trail, a residue of awareness.  But sometimes they are obstructed and require the assistance of a skilled practitioner.

My wound material has been under the skilled care of a team of practitioners.  I first spoke of the wound with my core teacher, Allan Morelock.  He’s both my spiritual GP and a highly skilled specialist. He held the revelations without judgment and offered a salve of love and acceptance.  The Let’s Talk Sex course community was a collective massage team that prodded around the wound awakening its field of feelings: pain, distress and confusion.  Over time, the confusion gave way to a pressure to acknowledge the nature of the wound, which for the first time in my life, I spoke to my Beloved partner, revealing the people, places and actions that caused the wound.  Since then, the scar tissue of the wound has softened, parts of it have been metabolized into my Being.

But the deeper parts have been more stubborn.  They have required a commitment from me, welcoming them forward.  I say it’s been a commitment from me, but of course, it’s not been me at all; it’s been the flow of Being, bringing around events and realizations, revelations that have created space around and shed light on what has been buried for so long.  It has brought me into the transmission field of teachers whose skills with healing are both mysterious and effective.  The Shamanic healers Cielle and Jeffrey Backstrom peeled away the layers of dead and decaying matter between the wound and its healing.  They’ve created the space for and called in those who are the wisdom keepers for my life.  These keepers have revealed some of the conditions that led to my wounding and as importantly the patterns that caused it to fester, darken and limit.  They’ve brought me to readiness for surgery.

Last night, I entered the operating theater via a Skype session that brought me face to face with the psychic surgeon, Allan Morelock.  There’s a way that being in the transmission of these deeply embodied spiritual teachers, Sandra, Cielle, Jeffrey, and Allan, slices through my resistance to exploration.  In their loving, laser-like gaze there is neither a need nor a place to hide. My relationship with these teachers, especially Allan who mid-wifed my awakening, is deep.  The trust is bedrock.  The loving care, the truth telling, are utterly reliable and inescapable.

Meeting Allan last night, entering his transmission field stripped me down to the deepest, ickiest place in my wound. Through conversation, we unpacked it and bathed it in light.  He guided me into a meditative state in which we could lift out each piece of the wound, both the “story” of what happened, and the ways in which the conditions and patterns of my life have caused it to fester over decades.  He held it all in the light of loving investigation, of forgiveness and release.  He drew the whole gaping wound out of my body, left a large, tender spaciousness in its place.  In the hours to follow, in recovery mode, I rested in the pain of healing.  I was exhausted with the work of Being more fully alive.

This morning, in meditation, the palliative care of body, mind and spirit, I rested in the ongoing healing of my wound.  I rested in awareness of its long history, our long relationship, the dance of accommodation.  I acknowledge the way that relationship is changing through the healing process.  Sandra Glickman has famously said “wounds formed in relationship can only be healed in relationship.”  And in my experience this is true of all healing.

There’s a way that the depth of wounding is matched by the length of healing.  What we bring in with us when we enter this fleshly experience of our Being, what we accumulate from the early days can take the rest of our days to integrate.  There’s a way in which being alive in this human body is the core wound of experience.  When we awaken as embodied consciousness, we enter into the dance of healing, of mediating the distance and dissonance of Being and Body, which are both one and separate.  Like Michelangelo’s iconic depiction of the outstretched fingers of God and Man, these bodies are a constant ache toward the eternal.

A Poem of Paradox

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Waiting for Snow

Tonight, I strip day’s clothes
by the heater, my skin
rough and dry as a reptile.
I close curtains against
creeping cold, and the spider
plant rustles like a cough
in my hands. Its tender
tendrils whisper feel me!
And I do.  With my whole body
I feel the weight of its bound
roots and the smell of dirt
dusty and brown. My arms
hold it to my chest, place
it on the coir mat by the door
and pour water into its lanky
leaves.  I pour and pour
as if it is my own thirst I slake.
It exhales a spring night
redolent of earth and rain.
I bow my face and breathe
such sweet fragrance
sleeping now in fist-tight
bulbs and roots awaiting Spring.

 

 

 

Equanimity for the Transient

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It’s a brilliantly cold day here today.  Up to a whopping 12 degrees with a wind chill of 7.  The sky is bright blue with hints of cloud spread around the edges, jet trails, mare’s tails, dry brush strokes of white that striate the blue.  It’s still technically morning, a few minutes to noon as I write this.  Morning, noon, night, hour, minute, month, year, all these abstract concepts that we lay upon our experience to try to rein it in, keep it in our “control.”  It is, of course, New Year’s eve, the last day of this construct known as 2014.

And even though it is a construct, a concept, it’s useful in its way.  We are not cut loose in timelessness, merged with the continuum of time and space.  We are here, somewhere, in these bodies that, like their sisters the plants, turn daily toward the sun for guidance, for nourishment, and then toward the dark for rest. And the days come and go and come and go, as the moments come and go and come and go, each one a realization: I am here.  I am this.  I am.

I am in a place of deeper translucence these days, a place of abiding joy, which has no opposite.  I was thinking earlier on my drive back from town, from yoga, coffee, groceries, about an article I read once about “The Happiest Man Alive.”  It was about a Buddhist monk, a Frenchman I think, who had spent the last twenty or so years of his life meditating about 20 minutes every day.  I remember envying him his happiness and at the same time considering the differences between living in the robe in a monastery and living in the myriad relationships of the wider world.  Today, the gap has all but disappeared.  Every life has its heavy lifting, even in the monastery.

I heard a story once from a Buddhist teacher of mine, who had herself, spent a few decades in the Thai Forest tradition.  It was about a monk in her order, a former US Marine, who had found his way from a tough youth to the military, and from the military to the war Southeast Asia, and from the war to the monastery.  There was in the order another monk who had a habit of sitting too close to the former Marine, usurping his space.  One day, at the end of his tether, the Marine called out the other monk–let’s take it outside, so to speak.  As they squared off in anger, the Marine monk suddenly stopped and looking at his raised fists dropped them into a namaskar mudra and a bow.  The monks embraced and went back to their meal.

It’s a good story, and one that speaks volumes about the challenges of being in one of these “meat suits,” this super sensitive bodymind with its millions of neurons and nerves firing non-stop day in and day out.  It’s about awareness and energy, about the need to embody what arises, to let it have its say and at the same time leaning into the way our own emotions, our anger, say, is ours alone, and the way what we encounter moment by moment is our teacher.

My teacher, Allan Morelock, says that equanimity is this realization.  That when we are in this moment with complete awareness, whatever the moment contains, whether pain or pleasure, that awareness is equanimity, and equanimity is joy, which has no opposite.  The mirror does not, as in the fairy tale, tell you whether you are beautiful or not.  It only reflects what is presented to it.  Where our conditioned experience meets the mirror, there can be a huge distance between subject and object.  Allan says they are one.  You are only as beautiful as you feel.  Coming to this truth requires us to relax into all the old stories, all the old patterns, resting in their deep discomfort.  After years of self judgment, denial, criticism, anger, bitterness, if we can rest in the truth of our woundedness, our vulnerability, then we can rest in our beauty, our innocence.

Wherever you are today, in balmy warmth or frigid cold, whether in pain or in ease, in community or in solitude, may you gaze into the mirror of your heart and find the truth of your beauty.  May you have joy in this moment and all the moments to come.

A poem for the Solstice

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Out of the Long Night

After a day of snow, sun.
In my small south facing room
great thumps of avalanche
from the roof.   Window
lights my face, lifts me up
to welcome the directions,
the elements.  Smoke from
the censor fragrant with myrrh,
frankincense.  I turn clockwise,
east to east while the pines
drip and the sky stands
still in all this turning.
Clouds mark the journey.

Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And death’s dark shadows put to light
Rejoice, rejoice Emmanuel!

The words are seeds in memory
blooming this morning, small
bright shards in my heart, open,
open, to welcome the coming.

Rejoice.  Rejoice.  Rejoice.

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When the King Be Witnessed in His Power*

I’m weary of the fear
that turns us to killing
while the mist hangs
over the mountains.
Weary of the stream
of mindless endings,
unlike the river, who
travels to the sea.

I’m weary of the thread
of dead and deader.
The dread-nought
and juggernaut.  God
in the machine.  I’m weary.
I’m weary.  I’m weary.

 

from Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz when I died”

Healing the Parts that Make Us Whole

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To heal, you must be willing to disrupt your equilibrium. To go deep into the unseen, unknown places, to allow the energy there to be stirred and released.

As part of my process of becoming a mentor in the spiritual tradition I follow, I am required to undergo six therapeutic sessions–typically these are psychological, sessions of “talk therapy.” Talk therapy has long since stopped being a mode that works for me, that gets into the depths of my shadow places, the parts that are in need of exploration and exposition. Years of yoga and various body-centered energetic healing modalities have unearthed and revealed into the light of recognition long festering patterns of behavior. So to meet my six session requirements, I requested and was given permission to work with a pair of Shamanic healers who teach in our lineage.

The question I’m pursuing is not important. Although it has a story or elements of story: a who, what, where and when, and likely has a why, I’m not really pursuing those. I’m no longer interested in the story per se. It’s more like a flavor, a residue. It’s like the splinters that remain after a large sliver is removed from the flesh.

I’ve worked with these two healers previously around this particular issue, and in both cases, they brought about huge shifts for me. Each time, we met in person in small groups that were working together for a longer period, once for a week and then for a weekend. The sessions I’m doing now are happening via Skype. They begin with prayer, with calling in the elements, the unseen guides that surround us at all times. There’s a short conversation about the issue being pursued, and then there’s a long period of energetic work in which I am more or less passive, sitting, eyes closed, breathing the circular breath used in rebirthing, and feeling into what is happening in my body.

A lot happened in my body. Painful contraction around my solar plexus. Heat. Cramping. More heat. Deep vibration. My teacher held me between two crystals, one at my crown and one beneath my feet, and my body was filled with expansion. I had to loosen my shoulders from their joints and let my arms hang out at an angle. I saw the Christ and Magdalen. I saw my father and waves of light that was more than light, a sort of deeply embodied incandescence. I was the hills and the snow and the ether that holds everything.

She told me that I would continue to integrate the healing. It might show up in my dreams. Might interrupt my sleep. Might make me vulnerable, raw, irritable. To ground myself, drink plenty of water, take hot baths. Walk consciously in the outdoors, breathing the cold air, feeling the earth beneath my feet. To ask for forgiveness. To know that I was healing.

In the last thirty six hours, I’ve manifested most of the side effects she noted. I feel a deep discomfort in my body, in my Being. And yet, as she pointed out, this is how I know that healing is happening.

We are always a process. Never a product. There is no end point, no completion, no perfection. As long as we inhabit these human bodies, we will continue to unfold. When we awaken into embodied consciousness, it is a second birth, a continual maturation that along with our being alive brings a deepening into what we are. All that has come before us going back to the primordial ooze is within us to be integrated. We are not separate from all that is or has ever been. The further I go, the deeper I go. It’s a folding as much as an unfolding. I fold more deeply into my parts as they unfold within me. I’m merging with every thread and fiber of my Being.

This is an essential process for anyone who sets out to guide others on their journey. It’s a shamanic process, this journeying. We must be familiar with the terrain and be willing to face its fearful aspects as well as its shining peaks. We must be willing to upset our own equilibrium, to lean into our own discomfort, to take everything we have been given and honor its gifts. Being is a powerful master. Are you willing to learn what it has to teach? In life, the poison is often also the antidote. Learning is homeopathic. A small dose will go a long way.

What’s the Value of a Community School Education?

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Rain + Kids =  Persistence

Subhaga Crystal Bacon's avatarMVCS Kids

It’s been a super rainy fall here in Twisp.  Many a day sees our kids come in wearing their Bogs and rain jackets, and this is a good thing because at least once a week they go off into the great outdoors to learn about nature IN nature.

The Community School prizes outdoor education.  It’s not about field trips in the old fashioned sense of the word, as in going to museums or performances, although those are always enriching.  No.  At MVCS, field trips are literally trips into the field, the place of study.  For us, this year, field is field. Our kids have spent many hours in rain and shine mapping, hoeing, planting, and tracking what they’ve planted where so that, in spring, they will be able to measure their success.

Historically, the MVCS has produced top notch scholars who go on to populate the honor roll at the public…

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Home on the Range

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I’m home alone here half way up the Twisp River Road. There’s a grace to this solitude, a deeper quality to the quiet. Much as I love my people who are usually here in one configuration or another, I love this aloneness, too. They’re yin and yang; they define and contain each other.

After work, I turned on the irrigation for a while and let out the chickens. The sight of the sprinklers spraying water into the late afternoon sky is magical. Truly. The water starts up in the mountains somewhere and makes its way down into the Valley as snow melt, and through engineering it runs along the bottom of our land, and then via pump runs up hill into the yard. I took a walk down to the ditch to make sure the filter screens weren’t clogged with algae that could cause the pump to burn out, then I walked back up and stood for a while just below where two streams of spray intersect, in a dry triangle of brown earth. The smell of moisture is nourishing. It must be hard wired into our limbic brains, the scent of life.

I prepared a simple dinner from salad greens and bok choy with a dressing I made yesterday. I sat in the open window reading some poems of Linda Hogan, whose work I strongly recommend. Here’s a snippet from “The Hidden,” in Rounding the Human Corners “I don’t care what you call it,/the human other portion, trust, belief./What if you looked at it all asalant?/Then you would never have arrived/in the good red land, the heat,/suddenly finding the spring/and the wild horses.//Paradise has always been just out of sight.”

After I turned off the water and opened the root cellar doors to let in the cool night air, I sat in the hot tub to watch the sun set. It torched the aspens that are still going from green to gold along the ditch, turning their leaves to flames. Bands of pink the color of smoked salmon spread out above the mountains to the West. Gray wisps of mare’s tales like bands of smoke. Summer’s fires are finished. The hint of burning in the air is stoves. The conflagration of clouds is only gas and light and particulates of matter that lend color to the sky.

I thought to look into each of the three directions visible from there, and faced north to see two large black steers well up into the hills. Slowly, they merged into one shifting black cloud of hoof, hide and bone. Grazing their way along the ridge.

South holds the trees, mostly pine and spruce that spread out in their own jacquard pattern like points of brocade following the river. An embroidery of trees.

It’s dark now. A little after seven. I can still hear the river, even as it dwindles toward winter. Out in the night landscape, everything is alive, hiding, hunting, feeding. Sometimes, in the morning as I drive down toward the road and town, I see signs of what has come. Recently a large pyramid of bear scat, purple with berries. What a thrill to know that this land with its houses and cars and Internet still holds enough wildness to feed bears. A month ago at dusk I saw a cougar cross the road. And well after dawn earlier this week heard coyotes in the east.

Here’s Linda Hogan again in her poem “Fox.”

I have to love and hate it
because its body is my cat,
my neighbor’s cat,
and even though I hurt
I know that this was not a gunshot,
not an accident on the road,
not a long illness.
This is god swallowing what it must.

My God continue to feed and feed on wherever you live.

The Unfathomable Mystery of Being

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I would be a liar if I said my life were without layers. One moment seamless well-being and ease, and another moment deep discomfort and existential pain.

Today, at the school where I work, two girls, close friends for most of their short seven and eight year old lives, had an altercation. None of the adults witnessed it. Suddenly there were tears and recriminations. Neither girl denied her actions, the sharp elbows into another’s ribs and the subsequent slap in the face. One of the teachers, as is our way, took the girls away from the rest of the group and asked them to talk to each other about what happened. No one lectured them about the inappropriateness of aggressive physical contact. They know about that. They each spoke from the feeling of the moment. There was anger. There were hurt feelings. There was an apology and an opportunity to speak further about the issue. Then they went off together back to class.

In itself, this is a somewhat unique story. And I offer it as an example of how unfathomable we are to ourselves and to each other.

Life has layers. I’ve been in an ongoing conversation that I mentioned in an earlier post with an east coast friend about the nature of suffering. And in my experience, we all suffer in some way from time to time. Simply being incarnated, being in this physical realm, can be quite painful, and that pain can cause suffering, even for those of us who have realized the Self. What changes is our relationship to the suffering. It takes on a sort of simplicity, free from story and ideation. Often it comes up right alongside our realization of its source in the still undigested bits of our conditioned existence. To deny that we suffer in this way is to deny our humanity.

In my experience, as in the story I recounted above, all relationships open the door to the unfathomable mystery of the self and the other. Now some may say “there is no Other!” And there’s a way in which that is true. And at the same time, paradoxically, there are 7 billion incarnated beings on this Earth, and each one of them appears to the body mind on some level as “other.” When we encounter this other, it is an encounter with the Self. Whatever we experience with them is being experienced within the self. It’s a mirror showing us something about our own particular path in this life. In the account above, the girls experienced a paradox of relationship. In loving there is also irritation. There is shadow. In relationship, there is separation and merging, irritation and bliss. We can’t have one without the other.

One of the most beautiful things about the altercation between these two schoolgirls was the fierce anger of the one and the heartbreak of the other. Children are transparent. They have not learned how to dissemble, not completely. And what I loved in watching their exchange was that they were willing to be fully present with what arose. “You made me mad.” “You hurt my feelings.” It was clean and simple. No one pretended that they felt other than they did.

The further I go on this path of embodied awakening, the more I realize how little I know. Nothing is static. Everything is changing. I don’t know my Self, my partner, my family, my friends. I experience them. In the moment. Being is continually unfolding, painting itself, as my beloved teacher Allan Morelock has said, on us in each moment. We must awaken to this truth. We must awaken to its its iridescent beauty of emergence. Its unfathomable mystery.