July 16, 2011 – Vancouver

“Journeys start from where we are. Everything starts from where we are. Where we are is where we’re supposed to be.” – Evelyn Eaton, The Shaman and the Medicine Wheel

This day-trip in the North Shore mountains, just 20 minutes from downtown Vancouver, and 10 minutes from the Commercial Drive area, will teach you tools and ceremonies for working in nature to access your own inner guidance and the guidance that nature can bring. This could be in the form of answers to questions, deepening connection with the greater mystery, healing, letting go, accepting, or gaining new strength. Whatever you need is available to you, and can be reflected to you through the mirror of nature. You will learn different ways of working with the four directions to access this guidance.

Our ceremony will begin with setting our intentions for the day and creating a sacred container for learning by creating an altar together. You will learn the four shields, an ancient model of understanding the psyche of humans and nature. Each shield corresponds to a cardinal direction, with its own colours, textures, seasons, stages of life, and qualities of true nature.

Then you’ll explore what you’ve learned on a solo medicine walk. After brief instruction, you will go on your own solo walk in nature, seeking guidance from our dear earth mother and her diverse creatures. Following in the footsteps of our ancestors from many cultures and traditions, this solo time includes fasting from food, human company, and human-built shelters. At the end of the day we will break our fast together with brown-bag lunches while we share our stories with each other around the circle.

9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Saturday
We’ll meet at a location in the Commercial Drive area and carpool from there. Bring your lunch. Wear comfortable shoes for walking on hiking trails, as part of the day will be spent wandering through the woods by the Seymour River.

Cost: $30 (free for those who wish to participate if the fee is an obstacle)
To register, please fill in the online Registration Form. For payment information, see Fees.

For a brief account of last summer’s amazingly awesome Chirunning and yoga retreat, see here.

In the summer of 2008, the grandmothers and grandfathers of this land greeted a vision faster, perhaps for the first time in many years. It is known that the Upper Similkameen First Nation travelled through the valley seasonally, gathering plants. Did the elders of the community put youths out on the land to fast while they sojourned here? I have seen a hilltop that might have been a spot for sacred ceremony…

Kim and I were very pleased that our plans to host a vision fast came to fruition August 1-4, 2008, with a two-day fast. The retreat began with a day of preparing the faster for the solo time. While the guides remained in basecamp, the faster went out into wild nature and spent her solo time with the land and her creatures. The final day was a celebration and time for the faster to tell her story and have it received by her people. Many thanks to the spirits of the seven directions for keeping the faster safe and returning her to us.

In the summer of 2005, the retreat centre hosted a four-day medicine wheel gathering, taught by Joyce Lyke and Tracy Leach. We built a medicine wheel together, and learned how to walk the four spokes of the wheel and work with the spirits of the seven directions (South, West, North, East, Earth Mother, Sky Father, and Centre). Since this gathering, the wheel has been open, available to those seeking guidance from the spirits of the land and the spirits of our ancestors.

The retreat centre has hosted numerous meditation and inquiry gatherings for students of the Diamond Approach, a spiritual path for inner realization. Inquiry is a method for sensing into one’s direct experience in the moment, as deeply as possible. Sensing physical sensations, as well as emotions and thoughts, can lead us to deeper, more subtle experiences of our soul.

Practicing inquiry outdoors in wild nature can open us to different kinds of experiences than occur indoors. We have explored inquiring with each other and with nature beings such as trees and rocks. Several New Years inquiry celebrations at Monkey Valley have involved dancing, sacred ceremony, and inquiry in the snow!

July also marks the two-year anniversary of this blog! Two years ago my friend John Harper encouraged me to begin writing about ecopsychology and the work I do in nature. Since then I have shared many stories of the land at Monkey Valley, wilderness work, and my happy trails and trials running. Writing this blog has been an expression of my heart as I have shared stories with you of the things that I love. The creativity of writing whatever I feel like in a blog format has felt like a flow of fun and lightness of spirit (with an occasional dash of despair about my unruly ways). I sometimes wonder if anyone reads this blog, but I do hear from one or two readers from time to time! So please join me in celebrating this two-year anniversary, and drop me a note to let me know you’re out there!

This year I am offering a new program at Monkey Valley, together with Angela James—the ChiRunning and yoga retreat July 23 – 25. In addition, it will be the third summer in a row of putting a faster out on the land to fast for a vision, using the ancient and modern ceremony of the vision fast. And, on June 20, I brought the four-shields teaching and medicine walk to Vancouver in a new day-long format.

Two beautiful souls accompanied me to the forest beside the Seymour River in North Vancouver, where we created an altar in a clearing on the bank of the river. Using the form of speaking from the heart known as council practice, we did several rounds. The first round was in honour of our fathers and Father’s Day. It was very moving to express appreciation for the gifts our fathers have given us. The second round was in honour of the summer solstice. Then the participants spoke of their intention for their medicine walks.

Although it was a cloudy day, the land was lush and green, and bursting with salmon berries. Although the participants were to fast from food, shelter, and human companionship during their walks, I left it up to their own inner guidance whether to make like bears and enjoy the berries! While my two friends went on their three-hour walks, I sat beside the river, and drank in the silence and beauty. The water rushed by, green and playful. Sometimes the spumes of white foam curling over rocks looked like little skunks swimming upstream. Swallows swooped low, eating bugs in the air over the river, and one swallow circled, swooped, and darted around in a long loop about five times before seeking new bugscapes. A bald eagle flew upriver high overhead, and a pair of ducks sped downstream in a formation as tight as fighter pilots. What a gift it was to have this unhurried time to watch nature do her thing. As time went on the quieting of my mind deepened, and the trees across the river began to reveal their mysteries in a way that the ordinary waking mind cannot hear.

The richness of my solo time was enhanced by knowing my companions would be back soon, with stories to tell of what happened on their walks. They returned with gifts of stories and berries, and we ate a meal together in the circle before sharing the stories. It was very moving to hear how the land and her creatures had interacted with my friends on their walks. I felt a deep appreciation for this special place, and for the people who were willing to take time to be with themselves in a quiet, intimate way. After we closed the circle, packed our things, and said goodbye to the spot that had held our ceremony, we hiked out through the forest trails feeling a little lighter and closer to our hearts.

I also felt inspired to do some work on the medicine wheel. I went down there to pray for my friend Dorrie, who died recently, and felt spirit telling me it was time to finish the wheel, which was created at a medicine wheel teaching in 2005. At that time we laid out the direction stones and center stones, and filled in most of the rest of the wheel with pieces of wood. Now I started replacing the wood with stones—the grandfathers. I dug a narrow trench from the east door to the south door, in honour of the spring section of the wheel that we are in right now. And I filled in the entire curve with beautiful stones. That was a bit of a job, as the stones felt the need to periodically leap from the wheelbarrow on the journey from my house to the wheel. I did my best to be patient with them, but at one point my patience ran out and I pleaded for their cooperation!

The time at Monkey Valley ended on a sad note, with a morning discovery of weasel corpse in the downstairs bathroom. The poor little thing has expired. I don’t doubt this is due to torture by Donald. It was a real gift to get to see weasel up close, this time in his summer clothes, but I felt sad that his life is over. He emitted a perfumey, flowery musk smell, which I also noticed in the region of Donald’s nose. What a perfect creature this weasel was; whole and self-contained. His is-ness was striking, even though he was no more.

I didn’t feel as sad about this tiny animal death as I used to do when I found a bird or mouse that Donald killed. It used to break my heart. I wondered if my heart has hardened, but a dear friend suggested that perhaps I am just more connected with the natural cycle of life and death now, through the time I have spent in connecting with the land. So that I can accept the natural fact of death better. Maybe so.

Accepting the death of my friend is a different matter, which I don’t wish to treat lightly in this blog. I will say that I am missing her very much. I pray that she is held in loving light, and is at peace, finding her way in the new formlessness she has become.

To place the West in the context of a wheel, picture that the North is at the top of the wheel. Then moving clockwise, East is at the right of the wheel. Continuing clockwise, South is at the bottom of the wheel, and the West is at the left side.

Each direction has different qualities associated with it. Are these qualities inherent to the direction? I would say sometimes they are not, though often they seem to be. For example, in the northern hemisphere, the North is ultimately the direction of the North Pole, which is white with ice and snow. At least it will be for a while longer, I hope. So to associate white with the North makes sense. But in the southern hemisphere, it would make more sense to associate white with the South, because in the South is the icy South Pole and Antarctica.

The East is associated with the colour yellow, which makes sense when you consider the sun rising in the East. Similarly, the West is associated with the colour black, in part because the sun sinks below the horizon in the West, causing darkness to fall. The South is associated with the colour red, and there are reasons for this as well, which I will discuss another day.

The interesting thing about the colours is that peoples from all over the world have devised systems similar to the four shields, including the medicine wheel of the North American plains peoples and the wheel cosmology of the Dagara people of Africa, and they choose the primary colours of the earth and sky—red, black or blue, white, yellow, green—although they may place the colours in different directions of the wheel.

Returning to the question of whether the directions have qualities inherent in them, I have come to view the four shields and other models as ways of organizing and working with aspects of reality, including the outer world and our inner nature. The four shields can be used as a tool for contemplation and understanding, just as the I ching, runes, tarot cards, and many other tools can help us look at an issue in our life and see something new.

Over the next few postings I will be exploring more qualities of the West with you. I invite you to join in an exploration of the West.