Page 37 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2
P. 37
Master General thought for a moment. “Thirty-‐six thousand.”8
By following the dreams and listening to the community, a huge wave of creative energy and local
wisdom was unleashed and successfully acted upon in ways that laid the groundwork for growth and
development in the ‘tangible’ realm. One unexpected result was the profound and life-‐changing
training that my colleagues and I have received over the years. It is intriguing to consider that Nature
and the Other World seem to have undertaken (ha) the radical project of seeding change where it is
arguably most needed: among westerners. This is accomplished, in part, by recruiting the least likely
among us into experiences that broach no doubt whatever as to the luminous agency of the spirit
world. Go to any bookstore and you will find shelves of books filled with the stories of unwitting
westerners who have stumbled into sacred indigenous teachings.
Last week, I met a man who will soon come to a circle being offered by my community here in the U.S.
to speak the stories that haunt him from his time as a volunteer fireman – the water-‐swollen corpses
he has pulled from rivers and ocean, the charred remains trapped in burnedout buildings, the mangled
bodies of young drivers in wrecked cars. He is bursting to tell his stories into the container of the circle.
He has had nowhere to put them. His sense of isolation as pushed him to the brink of a nervous
breakdown. His first question about the people in our circle: Do they do any drumming? It turns out
that neuroscientists are discovering what the Ancients knew, what Indigenous people have always
known, and what our broken hearts tell us if we will listen: that storytelling, theater, collective
ceremony, rhythmic sound and movement heal trauma. This knowing is instinctive, primal.9
At one time, our interactions with the natural world were also instinctive and primal. In the world of
animal tracking, there is something known as ‘baseline gait’. It is the relaxed, unhurried movement of a
contented animal moving through its environment, looking, listening, gathering the information it
needs to thrive. This gait is visible in its tracks. But we humans, with our unrelenting electronic assaults
on our nervous systems and the chemical assaults on our physical bodies; our shoes and our concrete;
our computers and our planes and our cars, have lost our baseline gait. Our brains compensate by
taking a zillion snapshots of the world around us, frantically cobbling together a partial but distorted
8 Elephants also mourn their dead. They have specific burial rites and can remember the exact location of their loved ones’
remains. Dolphins, chimps, dogs, sea lions, geese and many other animals mourn as well.
9 The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Viking, 2014
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