Ten Tips for Surviving Your Family During the Holidays
1. Practice quality listening. Nod at appropriate times, and remember you’ll miss them when they’re dead.
Read MoreA Rise of Color
To know deeply who we are helps us stand with each other.
Apathy makes us an accessory to murder. Inaction makes racism our legacy. If we are tired of hearing about injustices against black lives, we almost surely benefit from institutionalized oppression. We who have the luxury of ignoring this struggle are those who are now called to engage, to speak up, to avoid being complicit in systematic murder through silence.
Read MoreOld Ways, New Days: Shamanizing for the Non-Initiate
"Lucid dreaming" is a way of life. (By the way, we're dreaming.) It's fun to plumb the depths, and to have big plans and questions on the horizon. That way, we won't end up wondering what to do with our next limited window of endless possibility. (And we won't default to flying, having sex with hapless dream figures, or trying to convince people that we're dreaming.) We can do so much more. Remembering this re-establishes the wild dreamways of our ancestors. It doesn't require huge effort, just awareness of an intergenerational group endeavor. When more of us inquire about the old/timeless dreamways, or use dreaming as cultural excavation, we're making these established pathways easier for each other to access and navigate.
Read MoreThe Scientific Method and Other Mass Delusions
Scientific observation has confirmed the interdependence of all life. Everything, it turns out, is joined at the hip. But for some reason, our scientific practices do not acknowledge interdependence. The act of observation changes that which is being observed, from the medium-sized science of clinical trials to the infinitesimal realm of quantum oddities. How can we not affect stuff? How can stuff not affect us?
Yet when we design experiments, we reinforce our first major delusion: that we are separate from the universe, and that the universe itself is made up of other, separate things, which can be studied in isolation to further isolate more things. Enter René Descartes, who taught us that the world is made of discrete parts. If science is the observation of phenomena over time, then the only agreed-upon result that any enduring observation yields is that things are temporary. We can even say that they do not exist at all, at least not in any solid way. I'm not talking Nihilism here. I'm talking endlessly-bursting-forth-in-every-moment life. I'm talking about the exhilaration of groundlessness with no parachute.
Phenomena exist in the way that constellations exist, patterns generated into contexts by shared hallucinations, repeated. Imagine far-flung stars hundreds of millions of light-years apart, made of an arrangement of interactions we have named "light," which is literally ancient history. What we are seeing has often already exploded, and transformed into its next phase of being. Yet we construct a relationship we can hold onto, grasping for a 2-dimensional Orion in an infinite expanse of space that is often "too chaotic to be noticed or named." [4] As Vi Hart says, "I wonder if a proton plus an electron making a hydrogen atom […] is any more real than these stars making Orion. I mean, is it an atom, or does it just look like an atom?"
Read MoreTransforming Nightmares and Recurring Dreams
Nightmares are a trip. Sometimes they can unwind bouts of complexity in one massive discharge of fright. Sometimes they play unexamined or suppressed energies on repeat, i.e., recurring nightmares. Sometimes they help us digest trauma over many years. Nightmares are very clever in that they demand our attention, if even for a moment. Ultimately, they demonstrate and serve our wholeness.
Working directly with nightmares can be extremely difficult for people who have experienced torture, war, abuse, and any other major trauma. Support is essential, whether through guided dreamwork or through an experienced counselor. I recommend working with someone who deals with dreams, simply because PTSD has a strong correlation with nightmares.
Here are some tips I've compiled to help us transform nightmares and recurring dreams.
Read MoreRemembering Our Ceremonies with Respect to the Elders
At one time, I would have eagerly attended any ceremony, with a nose-to-the-glass desire to become whatever I witnessed before me. Now I attend strong in myself, as a guest, thankful for those who are able to have continuity with their homelands and ancestors. It is beautiful.
I am a person of many European clans, a fluid embodiment of bygone tribal eras. What do we do when we are a beautiful, confusing patchwork quilt of cultural expressions? When we are not born on ancient inherited land that stores millennia of ancestral memories? What would a ceremony even look like today?
Serving the Guardians of the Threshold
Moving beyond the terminology of "tolerance," our world is slowly opening to the celebration of How Things Are. We exist as, with, and because of an incredible diversity of life. This fluidity includes gender, of course. All of us have ancestors that transcend masculine-feminine gender duality. Let's just take a moment to think about and acknowledge that. Our very own ancestors, born to be who they are. Maybe today we'd call them genderqueer (or any number of emerging terms to address the specific identity-needs of humans), but they certainly had their own terms. In many cultures, such people were, and are, woven into tribal fabric as another valued strand. Our two-spirited predecessors whose very embodiment signals the big, beautiful truth of simultaneity, held important cultural posts.
Read MoreIn Sickness and in Health
"Everything shines by perishing."—preacher, Albany, GA
From the commencement address for Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College:
My wish for all of us is that we live a life that is already healed. That we recognize our terminal diagnosis without literally receiving one. That we see ourselves in the ocean so that our deeply-natural self-centeredness assumes value. There is nothing to lose, except the things that took up too much space anyway. Until death gives us his fond wave of equanimity and the only true cure, we share this body. This astounding feat of biology, this writhing mass of meat and miracle. This is who we are, absolutely replete and undeniably whole, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.
Read MoreHerbal Medicine on Its Own Terms
I have seen many articles making the rounds that discuss the "active chemical constituents" of herbal medicines and whole foods. And why not? This is how we create and analyze western pharmaceuticals, and how we describe their mechanisms of action. Curing Chemophobia: Do Not Buy Alternative Medicine by Michelle M. Francl takes this method of distillation a step further by using it to compare ancient herbal medicine with modern western medicine.
Ms. Francl compares one molecule of methotrexate, a western pharmaceutical that can treat arthritis, with a molecule of quercetin, present in the Chinese formula Four Marvels Powder (Si Miao Wan), which can also treat arthritis. She asserts that each of these toxic molecules can have a litany of adverse effects on the body, but at least methotrexate has been studied (by western science) and dosed with precision. Why should we place more trust the more benign-sounding substance, especially because we do not know its exact dosage, and because it is not in our western medical canon?
Francl's analysis is based on the assumption that breaking down these two medical systems into isolated constituents is an accurate or equitable way to compare them. But quercetin does not equal Four Marvels Powder, just as antioxidants do no equal blueberries. This modern metonymy is not poetic. It is an expression of our limited perspective. Maybe it is even a symptom of not feeling whole. In any case, I am calling into question this popular method of analysis.
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