Health involves an intuitive perception of the universe and all its inhabitants as being of one fabric. Health is maintaining communi-cation with the animals, plants, minerals and stars…seeking out all the experiences of Creation and turning them over and over, feeling their texture and multiple meanings. Health is expanding beyond one’s singular state of consciousness to experience the ripples and waves of the universe.
(Achterberg 1985, p.19)
Introduction
As an art therapist, how I interpret and define health is related to how I function in the realm of art and healing. It is also related to what I think a whole, or well, person is like. The quote cited above by Jeanne Achterberg is one that I subscribe to as a definition of health. It guides me in determining what I will do with people and how I will understand their artwork. Beyond that, this quote embodies a philosophy of life. It is an ancient one; it is shamanic.
This chapter examines three aspects of shamanism in connection with my personal experiences and my work with older adults in art. The first aspect is concerned with the need for communication with animals, plants, stars, etc. This forms the structure for acquiring help through spirit allies. The second aspect involves what Achterberg termed ‘expanding beyond singular consciousness’
and includes the shamanic experience of shapeshifting (Jamal 1988). The third and broadest aspect of a shamanic approach to health embraces Achterberg’s
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‘intuitive perception of…being of one fabric,’ a paradigm that supports and directs not only my work but my life.
From a spiritual perspective, our ‘singular state of consciousness’ is at the heart of healing or health. Since the decline of the Goddess cultures, our experience of self as being part of the world has slowly eroded. As ‘modern’
people our identity, our ego-personality, seems hopelessly wrapped up in a package of skin, isolated, vulnerable, and separate. The feeling that it’s ‘us against them’, that we are alone, that we are the only conscious and aware beings, that we must predict and control everything to feel safe and to live, is perhaps the most dangerous and damaging illusion of modern Western thought.
I believe this illusion of being alone is the foundation of fear expressed in our growing violence through such things as war, poverty, spousal and child abuse, environmental destruction, and the rush and pressure of modern life.
Since 1977 my professional focus has been on bridging this gap in awareness that leads to such sorrow. For me, because of an early calling into a deep recognition of the world as sacred, shamanism has been the lens through which I view my work in art and healing. Put succinctly, shamanism connects people with nature and spirit so as to gain understanding, problem-solving, and guidance. Conceptually, it also helps explain certain features of aging, as will become evident in my own story and the stories of two elder art makers whose creativity I encouraged in rural Oklahoma and Iowa. Shamanism works through imagery and the imaginal, and thus grounds art making in a profoundly ecological and spiritual healing tradition at least 20,000 years old. Unfortu-nately, much of current art therapy education has abandoned its grounding in art making. Because of this I choose to refer to what I am doing as ‘art and healing’ to avoid associations with categories of illness or diagnostic and inter-pretive processes that have little to do with the work described in this chapter.
Wind calling
the Four Great Winds…are about the process of creation, about mani-festing the dreams of our lives. (Medicine Eagle 1991, p.359) My calling into shamanism began around the age of 3 or 4.
I am lying on a mattress that is tucked into a small rectangular space and pressed against a window the width of my bed. It is on the second story of the house my father constructed with yellow brick and brown trim. I lay with my head beneath the window watching a sprinkling of stars wink within a
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velvet black sky. An invisible wind rhythmically fills the curtain, raising it ever so gently.
I am familiar with Wind’s various melodies: the watery sound of the cottonwood leaf, the taffeta sound of reeds rubbing, the creaking of branches, the drone between wires. But this time she speaks to me in words:
not child words, but big words, adult phrases, future meanings. Words are not exactly right either, it is sudden, fully comprehended knowing. She speaks to or through my fully realized ‘Soul Self ’ about my life, about nature, and about art. She fills me, like the curtain on the window, with a billowing sense of purpose, meaning, and wonder.
Following the whispering of the wind, I felt even more compelled to spend time outdoors in the company of ‘others’ not human. I was especially fond of trees and of being up high where I could see rooftops and children playing and the general comings and goings of a busy human hive. After hugging the tree, I would climb and search carefully for just the right curve between trunk and bough where I could nestle in and close my eyes while being gently rocked. The trees too, like the wind, speak, cradle, and advise.
In elementary school, the principal sends a notice to the parents recommending that they not allow their children to play with me. I am isolated for my differences – both for my personality and for my social status.
(My parents are working-class people in an upper-class school district) I am an untouchable of sorts. I have few friends except for the occasional ‘army brat’ who comes and goes with the movements of the military, and is therefore not privy to the ostracism underway. It’s painful. I don’t understand what’s wrong with me and I often cry myself to sleep.
It is only after I am an adult that I recognize the sacred opportunity and blessing.
In my isolation, I continually turn to nature for comfort and friendship. I quietly wander alone about the landscape listening, watching, touching, and tasting bushes, trees, bugs, birds, dirt, clouds, and water. Whenever I feel hurt, confused, or upset, the wind comes and whispers to me, consoling, cleansing, and clarifying. My relationships with the wind and wind-based phenomena such as weather, clouds, rain, and storms deepen. I can identify many voices and purposes coming from each cardinal direction and the four cross-quarters (NW, NE, SE, SW). This communication and connection continued undetected by others well into my teens.
I am 16. It is past midnight. I hear her, the North Wind, calling me. She shakes the leaves and sings through and around person-made and natural elements in a very particular way. The North Wind is my favorite; I believe
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she is the one who first spoke to me. Joyfully, I sneak outdoors and dance with her under my beloved cottonwood tree. The stars swirl and sparkle in that black blue dome. I know the starlight is alive and aware. The Wind tosses my hair in all directions and I laugh. I learn I am loved and that I am never alone. I learn to trust my inner hearing and my inner sight as gateways to the unseen and as voices of an animate and sacred landscape.
In my youth, I also learned never to speak of these things to anyone. As an adult I have carefully selected certain individuals to tell. The writing for this chapter represents the first time my experience has been shared in a public domain. It seemed that I frightened people or brought ridicule upon myself whenever I made mention of my experience. It wasn’t so much that I was seeking someone to tell this experience to as I was seeking some kind of confirmation that such experiences are genuine, ‘normal,’ and valuable.
A four-year art college provided an opportunity to give visual form to my love for all things not human. But once again my sense of spirituality and connection was thwarted. Apparently the meaning of a work of art was far less important than how well you used the materials. Rudolf Arnheim, the father of the psychology of art, has lamented this all-to-common approach to art making and art training. ‘It seems hard to believe that there are still persons in the arts who assert that the message of an art object is irrelevant’ (Arnheim 1986, p.236). This perspective is formally referred to as modernism. It emphasizes an aesthetics of the ‘disembodied eye,’ a kind of cold look at the formal elements of an image without much concern for the work’s content or meaning. It also emphasizes the alienated artist separated from the world and from any obligation to meaningful engagement with others. Modernism, then, also operates from the assumption of the self as separate and life as meaningless. I experienced this directly as my artwork soon shifted from figurative animal/human forms and landscapes to completely abstract work. It was an attempt to fit in that left me less than enchanted with my art and further away from my true self. Something was missing; I decided to move on with my art training in tow.
Teaching called to me as a way of relating to people through art, so I entered graduate school in art education. During student teaching, my professor noted how well I worked with the ‘slow’ students and suggested I look into something called art therapy. I did, and found a mentor who worked as an art educator/art therapist with an eye to the healing power and meaning of art making. Rudolf Arnheim indicated the role of art therapy is one of returning art to its original purpose. Art therapists ‘should show by their example that the arts, to sustain
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their vigor, must serve substantial human needs’ (Arnheim 1986, p.257). So it is through art therapy that I found the missing link to restoring meaning to my own and others’ creative work.
About this time of change, while still in graduate school, I came across a book titled The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968) by Carlos Castaneda. I was ecstatic. This was my first encounter with a culture with which I could identify. It was the validation I was searching for. In one of Castaneda’s many books, special attention is given to the Wind as advisor or ally, especially for Don Juan’s female apprentice. I devoured reams of written material on Native American and other indigenous peoples’ descriptions of spirituality and nature. I read about the practice of shamanism. I studied with Sandra Ingerman, who teaches the classic form of shamanism, and with Serge King, who teaches Hawaiian shamanism or Huna.
When Wind spoke with me so long ago, she imparted a sense of profound love and connection with all things natural and a need to express that love. So it is that art making with a therapeutic awareness and my spiritual experiences in nature find a meeting ground in the shamanic perspective. Before I go on to describe how I use this awareness and training in my work with adults and in my own artwork, it seems important to clarify some of the basic notions of shamanism.
The shamanic spirit
The word shaman comes from the language of the Tungus tribe in Siberia, but the practice of shamanism is a worldwide tradition. It has a very specific meaning that should not be confused with witch doctor, medicine men or women, medium or psychic. Michael Harner, the founder of the Center for Shamanic Studies in Connecticut and professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York, states that:
a shaman is a man or woman who journeys in an altered state of con-sciousness usually induced by rhythmic drumming…the shaman journeys to non-ordinary realities…for the purpose of diagnosing or treating illnesses; for divination or prophecy; for acquisition of power through interaction with spirits, power animals, guardians, or other spiritual entities; for establishing contact with guides or teachers in non-ordinary reality, from whom the shaman may solicit advice on community or individual problems; or for contact with the spirits of the
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dead. In all these activities, the shaman remains conscious and in control of his or her own faculties and will. (Harner 1988, pp.7–8) In other words, traditional shamanic activity is carried out in altered states of consciousness produced by sonic drumming or rattling. ‘Journeying’ is a reference to soul flight to non-ordinary realms referred to as the lower world, the middle world, and the upper world. These are imaginal places but that is not to imply they are make-believe. They are real, although of another level or dimension of consciousness that is spiritual, where the connection between all things is sustained.
Also common to shamanic belief is the concept of animal and spirit guides or guardians, whom I shall refer to as ‘allies’ in this chapter. The appearance and assistance of an ally in the imaginal realm brings to bear its particular qualities and strengths on behalf of the shaman for helping the community or an individual. Through a technique called ‘shapeshifting,’ shamans merge their consciousness with other beings, animals, plants, rocks, water, fire, wind, etc.
This form of communication promotes understanding and sacred or spiritual communion; it’s good for the soul.
Please note that these definitions are far from complete or comprehensive.
Rather, they point to a mystery that defies written or verbal description, a mystery that relies on imagination, image, metaphor, and symbol to reveal its presence.
Shamans also do other things besides making journeys to non-ordinary reality. Some of these things may be thought to be rather strange to most people in our culture, such as talking with plants, animals and all of nature. It sounds neurotic or deranged of course, from the perspective of much of Western psychology, nevertheless, our ancestors did it and managed to survive for three million years, whereas in the civilized countries of the world today, where people don’t talk with the planet and its inhabitants, we are also faced with the possi-bility of nuclear destruction and ecological catastrophe…the shamans say that we need to talk to plants and trees, animals and rocks because our lives and our spirits are connected with theirs. (Harner 1988, p.11) This quote summarizes my sense of resonance with shamanic thought and practice. It also names a common fear that shamanism is the work of the
‘deranged.’ A shaman ‘sees’ and ‘hears’ spirits and someone experiencing a psychosis also ‘sees’ entities and ‘hears’ voices. Yet, the distinction between the two is critical. A shaman always maintains awareness of his or her environment
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and everyday self (ego) during journey work. A person suffering from mental illness is taken over by the voices, is lost to him or herself. A shaman knows how to distinguish between the imaginal realm and the everyday world. Shamanic journeying, simply put, is the practiced and skillful ability to travel safely between these two dimensions of experience.1
In my personal life and private artwork, I utilize this traditional form of shamanic journey work. The following is a brief but dramatic example.