Sometimes the Shadow is White

When we are in a strange new environment, it is easy for our unconscious darkness to come out. Usually it becomes projected on others, those best able to carry the suppressed qualities. If I am suppressing my hostility, I will tend to see others as hostile before I see myself that way. Not me, it’s them. Put me in a position of authority with others whose skin color is much darker than mine and the Shadow is easily projected. But in that situation it gets projected in both directions. I unconsciously project my hostile feelings onto the Mexican-American or the Native American who interacts with me. They might also unconsciously project their feelings onto me. We each see the other with a chip on the shoulder daring us to knock it off. But those in authority over others have to be especially careful not to lose their temper. You could lose your job.

That is precisely how the football coach lands with his wife and two daughters in the heart of the vegetable growing community of McFarland, California. His students are mostly all of Native (Mexican) heritage. He is the over qualified assistant football coach, who chooses to hold out a player who appears to have a concussion. The older, whiter coach gets the newcomer kicked off of his staff because of their “disagreement”. Coach White, yes that’s his name, doesn’t know what to do. He wants a team to coach. He notices that some of his Physical Education students are extremely fast runners and decides to try something new, something he is totally unqualified to do, start a cross-country running team. The movie McFarland USA is a quasi-documentary of his struggles with his own Shadow and that of others.

Being a very white man in a predominantly Spanish speaking community makes the coach stick out. His fear surfaces the night they arrive, when the family goes out to dinner at the local taco shop. The woman cashier bridges the language barrier and brings them samples of the various meats, so they can choose how they want their tacos made. Already we see the kind and generous feminine energy emerging, the force symbolized by the Virgin of the fields painted on the wall of their new home. But on the way out of the taco shop, the coach sees a band of local “low riders” drive up in their classic autos. He sees them as hostile, sexually dangerous men with lecherous intentions upon his fifteen year old daughter. He does what any frightened rabbit would do in the presence of coyotes. He runs away with his family in their car making a spectacle of himself. A frightened Shadow exposes itself.

The rather amazing transformation of the coach continues to unfold with each frame of the film. All of his assumptions about his students begin to dissolve as he gets to know them and their families. He even tries working in the fields beside them to understand their lives better. He adjusts to their schedules and their needs. He becomes more and more aware of his own Shadow and finds ways to befriend it. He manages to endure their teasing once he understands their intention and its function. It brings him down to earth, the place where they dwell. And he has things to offer them as well, new experiences, hope and winning. And with winning comes the possibility of college, something no one in their families has ever experienced. This creates a lot of tension on both sides.

The story unfolds more and more opportunities for coach White to grow. He learns to respect the pickers and appreciate their value of family and cooperation. He learns about their culture and finds that he can gain his daughter’s acceptance through giving her a special celebration for her fifteenth birthday. The quinceanera is a huge success in that regard. It does have a painful twist, when the Shadow shows up as the uninvited guest. Throughout the story the strength and wisdom of the women runs like a beautiful, brightly colored ball of yarn weaving the characters into a web. The families begin to blend with their cooperation and their differences become more and more difficult to see. The coach grows up. He’s no longer the immature athlete trying to lead, he’s the person facilitating the success of his runners. He does create a team and he eventually sees that the feeling of belonging in an alien culture means he has found his spiritual home.

McFarland USA had a profound impact on me. It took me back to the five years I worked with a Native American tribe. I was the white guy who had to learn how to cooperate in a different culture. I found my sense of humor saved me, as did my very helpful coworkers. I had to wear the projected Shadow of the Native Americans every day. I learned to name their feelings and own them with Coyote’s sense of humor. This was surprising and disarming. Once we all could laugh, we could cooperate. We built a Pomo culture charter school and the tribal council chose my son to run it. His dancers were amazing. His musical abilities facilitated the percussion (clacker sticks), whistles, and singing. And of course everyone had to deal with their Shadow. But the round dance floor is intended to restore balance to our mother the earth. Whether Native Americans are running or dancing into the future, it is theirs to take. And if we are lucky, we get to watch them grow and unfold in all their beauty.

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Coyote’s Shadow

Two hundred years ago the people of various indigenous tribes sought to maintain and preserve their sacred traditions in the face of increasing incursions by the Western Europeans who had invaded Turtle Island. The creation of the peyote ceremony was the most successful response to the destruction of tribal cultures. Facilitated by the horrors of the Boarding Schools, a common language emerged. English was now used instead of sign language. After the defeat of the Confederacy in the bloodiest war in the history of humanity (the US Civil War), the victorious Union Army turned upon the indigenous tribes. We saw one response to that time in history in Kevin Costner’s portrayal of a Union soldier in Lakota territory, the one who “Dances with Wolves”. That movie illustrated how the collective Shadow of civilization is first projected onto the Other, the Confederacy, and then onto the Native Americans.

James Hollis described this phenomenon in psychological terms. He said, “Any content of the unconscious may be projected onto the Other at any moment. Moreover, the dynamics associated with that content, and its archaic history, will be transferred to the Other as well (p.103)”. He was talking about what we call the Shadow. In Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves (2007), Hollis says, “the Shadow is composed of all those aspects of ourselves that have a tendency to make us uncomfortable with ourselves. The Shadow is not just what is unconscious, it is what discomforts the sense of self we wish to have (p. 9)”. Let’s take a look at how this shows up in our Native American Church.

I attended a meeting up in northern California a few years ago. The Road Chief who was conducting the ceremony was not local. His biological family was Cheyenne and Dine. After his mother’s divorce he was raised by her Dine relatives who were practicing peyote people. He learned all about their fireplaces as a child, grew up taking more and more responsibility by hitting drum, taking care of the fire, and eventually being given a fireplace of his own. He unconsciously followed his father’s pattern. He married a beautiful woman from a very different tribal community, distant both geographically and culturally. She learned his family’s language and their traditions. Their bridge was the inter-tribal religion, the peyote ceremony or Native American Church, which in 1934 had been embraced by all of the recognized tribes in the United States. The couple sang beautifully together. I met them ten years ago when they had moved to her tribe’s land and he was far from home. They were warm and welcoming. I was delighted to meet them.

In the intervening years I had lost track of this couple, but I heard of their activities through my relatives (the moccasin telegraph). They had been fascinated by the prophesy of the eagle and the condor. They were participating in ceremonies with my friend and nephew, the curandero from South America. They even attended a Vision Quest and Sundance in his tribe’s lands. My nephew (yes, we made that relationship years ago) carries both the peyote altar and the Yaje (ayahuasca) altar. He is a Sundancer in the Lakota tradition and conducts Vision Quests in South America. This was the beginning of a new cooperative venture between the natives of both continents. And it was the perfect opportunity for the Shadow to step into their institutions.

Family and marriage are institutions which preserve and maintain cultural values; so are religious organizations. It is a little more difficult for projections to occur when everyone has brown skin. Those of us natives with white skin are familiar with this unconscious process. Brown-skinned natives can very easily treat us as the abusive Others, the ones who raped and pillaged their ancestors, who took away their tribal lands. Not all Native Americans do this of course. I’m not talking about the conscious attitudes of our brothers and sisters. Consciously we talk about how we are all Creator’s children and how the Native American Church was founded on including all people regardless of skin color or religious orientations. How else could all the tribes embrace an inter-tribal religion? It had to embrace all of them. But that was back in the early part of the twentieth century.

All this inclusive mixing of cultures and tribal traditions came home to roost in the meeting in northern California. All the relatives showed up with the best intentions to support the prayers of the sponsors. And these relatives also brought their unconsciousness (their Shadows) into the Tipi with them. But that is a given. Anytime humans get together they show up as the 10% they think they are and the 90% they don’t know they are. My first surprise was discovering the Road Chief wasn’t happy. If he recognized me, he didn’t show it and I didn’t remind him of where and how we had met. He was kind and considerate. He introduced me to his brother and a couple of other male relatives who had come all the way from Arizona to help him conduct the meeting. I figured I would discover what was bothering the Chief during the meeting. I did.

My nephew, the Yaje shaman from South America was there. His protege, a brilliant man working on a PhD in English literature, was taking care of the fire. The Door Man, was a very white guy, a nephew of Bob Boyle who effectively challenged the DEA and won in the Supreme Court our right to carry and eat peyote. Near him was the oldest member of the Native American Church, another Road Chief from Oklahoma. All of this made sense to me, because the sponsors of the meeting were aligned with these various people and their traditions. But I imagine the Road Chief was frustrated, having invited his family to travel all that way and then have only two jobs for them to perform, drum and throw cedar. I thought if anyone could carry this meeting, it would be the Road Chief. But I was wrong. The Shadow was soon empowered and running the meeting from the side.

We got through midnight water without a scratch. The Hispanic fireman was impeccable. He performed his duties with ease and sensitivity. He prayed for the sponsors in the ways they wanted. And the Road Chief shared the fireman’s smoke with the old man from Oklahoma as well as his grandmother from Arizona. He said he was honoring all the elders present in doing this. I doubt many people noticed that I was older than his grandmother and he didn’t offer the smoke to me. But then I was a white man and he didn’t know my son was one of the sponsors of the meeting. The first sign that we were headed for a train wreck was when the Road Chief offered a special smoke to the sponsors. I heard him say “I have found that this is a good medicine and I’m offering it to you to help with your prayer.” It was rolled in the traditional corn husk and it looked like a tobacco smoke, but it didn’t smell like one. It definitely smelled like ganga. I turned to another of my spirit sons and asked him if he could smell it. “Yes, that’s definitely ganga I am smelling.” The Shadow was out. Another medicine called marijuana was entering the magic circle. It wouldn’t have been so powerful, if the Road Chief had announced this to the entire circle, but he didn’t. It was a secret, special smoke only for himself and the sponsors.

One of the things which facilitates the Shadow is the process called denial. The marijuana growers don’t deny their business among one another, they just hide it from the Others. The old Road Chief from Oklahoma denies the fact that his sons and spirit sons support him on their profits from the cannabis fields. He openly and publically asserts “there is only one medicine in the Native American Church and that is peyote.” We all know how this works. We allow the old man his denial. He’s an elder. He doesn’t care what we do outside of the Tipi. But he’s very proud of the fact that his family were the very first peyote people in Oklahoma and that the protocol of the fireplaces honors the elders. If only his Cheyenne/Dine relative had remembered the protocol, things might have run more smoothly. But he didn’t.

When the sponsors prayed with tobacco for Main Smoke, the Road Chief fumbled the play. He didn’t offer the Smoke to the old man, who we all know is a very cunning coyote. Well, those of us who know him have seen his Shadow side, which is the coyote. I could have saved the ceremony by telling the Road Chief that he had skipped the old man, but I have been accused of trying to run the meeting from the side when I tried that with a Shawnee Road Chief several years ago. We were taught that we all have to “help one another” have a successful prayer service, and that means noticing when things go wrong. We are supposed to speak up and perhaps ask for cedar. That’s how I was taught by the old man who was about to bring down the Tipi on the unsuspecting Road Chief. Sick elders can pretend to get sicker, and that’s precisely what he did. He had to lay down. He needed special help, so the Road Chief sent his grandmother with the eagle feather fan over there to “cure” him. She didn’t know that the old man had a Dine spirit mom who had severely rejected and abused him a few years back. The lovely Dine grandmother’s help just heaped more fuel on the Shadow’s smoldering fire. I could tell the elder woman felt hurt. Her prayers and powers were ineffective. The old coyote medicine man was very strong in resisting her good intentions.

Brother Coyote

As the meeting went on, the old coyote got colder and colder. The Road Chief tried his “magic” on the elder. That had no effect. Before Morning Water time the old man insisted the Door Man drive him into town to the Emergency Room and the hospital. That’s exactly what happened. The Door Man  and a crew of the old man’s supporters carried him out of the Tipi in very high drama. They all left together. There was a huge psychic rip in the circle. An eighth of the community was gone as the ceremony stumbled to a close. The Door Man made it back in time to share the sacred foods and close the meeting. The old man from Oklahoma didn’t return, nor did his crew of supporters. The Shadow had run the meeting from the side and I just watched it all fall apart. It didn’t matter that we had the shaman from the amazon and his fireman taking care of the sacred fire. It didn’t matter that we had five Road Chiefs in attendance. The protocol wasn’t followed. The old timers would probably say “that’s what happens when you mix the medicines.” But that’s not how I saw it. The Shadow wasn’t acknowledged and none of us had the guts to speak up. I for one have been emotionally abused by the Shadow of my relatives in meetings and I wasn’t there to be a scapegoat. I was just trying to support my son.

When we mix tribal traditions with medicine, like we did when we instituted the peyote religion, we create new possibilities to preserve our family and cultural values. As long as those values live in the lives of the people participating in the Native American Church, the original intent of our ancestors survives for the next seven generations. Part of our traditions is the function of the Trickster, who will jump into the center of the circle and thumb his nose at both the Chief and the Medicine Person. We are supposed to accept that behavior and learn from it. Our ancestors built the Shadow a place in their cultures. He was honored and his Balancers or Clowns were treated with respect. When we forget to honor him and acknowledge him in our lives, he enters the Tipi with a vengeance and teaches us respect. Some of us can laugh at ourselves in such situations. If we take ourselves too seriously, humbling happens at the hands of Grandfather Coyote. I know. I have been on the receiving end of his jokes many times.

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The Eagle Staff

The psychic faire was taking place (invitations only) at a Behavioral Health Facility. The CEO was big on East Indian religion, traditions, and medicines. My friend was taking me there to meet our house guest, a world traveling female shaman. The people were nice, the food vegan, and the atmosphere strange. Having worked in Mental Health facilities in the past, I noticed the individualized cubicles of the social workers packed together in the large central room. The place was vacant. The private psychic faire/workshop was in the surrounding rooms, which were tastefully decorated in East Indian paintings, sculptures, and huge geodes of amethyst crystals. When it was time to go, my friend pointed to the shaman’s things and asked me to take a picture with the eagle staff. I photographed the shaman holding “her” staff. My friend insisted I hold the staff and be photographed as well. I knew he thought of my name White Eagle and wanted to see me holding that staff, so I complied, with serious internal reservations. Then I discovered it wasn’t even her staff. It was just leaning against the table behind her belongings. Ouch! We picked up and were photographed with someone else’s sacred object. I guess it was all right. There weren’t any Native Americans at the gathering.

When I mentioned on the drive home, that I attended Native American Church meetings, the shamaness told me of her one and only peyote ceremony. I immediately laughed, saying “I can’t imagine you enjoyed it.” She was suspicious. “Why do you say that?” she wanted to know. I had to choose my words carefully because I wanted to be honest and not offend her. “Well, because of the judgments and abusive way they treat newcomers.” She had already told me what a free spirit she was and that she disliked judgments, negative attitudes, and “lower vibrations”. She had been traveling in central America and met a wonderful man who mentioned he was headed south to attend a Native American Church meeting. “Oh, I’ve never been to a peyote ceremony,” she said, “I’d love to come.” I started to contain my laughter again. Her boyfriend must not have known much about the tradition, and yet he invited a totally new person without telling her anything except the date and place of the meeting. She showed up covered in feathers which she had collected in the jungle and was immediately told she couldn’t wear any of her feathers. Only the ceremonial leader could wear feathers. And then she was even more offended when the guy told her she couldn’t sing (she didn’t know any traditional songs). I burst out laughing at that point, as she continued to complain that the leader wouldn’t even let people lay down. She said she was almost reluctant to eat the peyote. She just ate a little bit and nothing happened.

I reassured her that she didn’t need to eat any medicine to have a high vibration. She was at one with the world and committed to world peace. That she was also judgmental of the Native American tradition and unconscious about how negative she was being was sad and at the same time hilarious. She must have met Coyote in the jungle and he invited her to a dose of humility. She just didn’t resonate with the ceremony. And then, I suppose the next question would be, what kind of a shaman is unaware she is walking with the Trickster? And to be surprised that she was asked to remove her feathers as being disrespectful of the Native American tradition? But then when you are in “THE NOW” and being present, I guess anything goes, if it resonates with the person’s spiritual guides.

I myself would never expect such openness from such a long and proud tradition as the peyote way. Their ceremony is an expression of their common tribal cultures. It is an inter-tribal religion, the Native American Church. There are universal cultural threads woven for hundreds of years in that ceremony. I guess Coyote was trying to teach my shaman friend a lesson. I’m not sure she learned it. Maybe she just brought me the story from Coyote so I could have a good laugh. I don’t know. But I had to share it. We humans are such slow learners. It’s good Creator is so patient with us.

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Another Coyote Tale

The Raven surprised me with his comment. “I read your blog post. More than the content, what I noticed is that you are engaged”. Coming from an accomplished writer like the Raven I was struck by how well he could see my personality was embedded in my writing. That was perfect. Yes, I do engage life and the people in my world. I live intensely, in the present moment. “What came up for me,” the Raven continued, “was how the Wolf couldn’t take being engaged. You were too intensely focused on life with him and his family. He didn’t know what to do with all that attention.”

The Raven was tying up some loose threads of destiny, as nesting birds tend to do in the spring. His family comes from Icaria, a Greek island of myth and politics, so the revolutionary’s spirit is embodied in his shiny black feathers, brilliant intelligence, and sharp beak. Like Raven’s Greek family, the Wolf’s grandfather emigrated from Eastern Europe to America, land of the free and home of the brave. The young wolves soon discovered what it meant to be brave. They had to fight their way to school every morning because they were Jews in the heart of the Roman Catholic colony of Maryland. Amazing what people will do for an education. To the Jewish Wolves freedom meant higher education and jujitsu training. Grandfather Wolf was a CPA. Papa Wolf had a Ph.D. and taught Law at one of the nation’s most prestigious schools. Papa’s traumatic youth and the resultant post-traumatic stress disorder was expressed in his lifestyle. It was acted out in the family. (Of course this was before Vietnam and the Holocaust got connected to PTSD.) He never recovered from his father’s emotional and physical abuse. He taught it to his sons, the Wolves, and then he died of cancer, an angry man. That’s where Coyote comes into the story.

Back in ’06 the Wolf wanted a new dad. He realized that he could adopt one, according to the Native American traditions which he was studying. I attended my brother’s Sweat Lodge, the Purification or Inipi Ceremony of the plains Lakotas. The Wolf was studying shamanism with my brother. He took care of the fire in an impressive way. The Wolf was an extremely sleek and enthusiastic fireman, he kept the rocks hot with his prayers and actions. He passionately cared about indigenous traditions and ceremonies. (He was simultaneously studying in Peru with a shaman.) It wasn’t long before the Wolf brought his wife and child into my world. We attended Native American ceremonies of all kinds and in that process his deceased father was very present. Synchronicity and parapsychology punctuated my life.

For example, I am attracted to books. I can tell a lot about people by looking at what they read. I noticed an entire collection of Greek and Latin classics in the Wolf family book case. I had used these books myself in college. Such a collection could easily belong to the Raven. He has degrees in Classical Greek and Latin and I would expect to find such treasures in the Raven’s nest. But this was my age-mate’s library, and I was struck with my predecessor’s interest in philosophy (the underlined passages in Plato’s work) and in the classics. These were not things his son found interesting, but somehow the Wolf had picked me out of the entire Lakota Inipi ceremony as a good father surrogate. I do share a lot of similar interests with the spirit of Papa Wolf.

The first time I visited the Wolf family mansion, I noticed a box of books in the foyer. My eye was drawn to Papa Wolf’s Ph.D Dissertation. It was on Canon Law, specifically regarding the status of the testimony of Jews against their ecclesiastical superiors. Canon Law is Roman Catholic Church Law, which has its history in the Inquisition. What an odd interest. It must in some way reflect the life of the author. Persecution, torture, and execution often resulted from Medieval trials. Papa Wolf’s soul was tortured. An angry, wounded intellectual, he could not express love or affection to his children.

Several times in ceremony I could feel the father’s spirit within me, merging and wanting to use my body to reach out to his son. The first expressions were of pride in his son’s accomplishments, almost like a scene from Fiddler on the Roof. “My son, the doctor” was the feeling I would have and share with the Wolf. But after a while the Shadow side of his dad would come out and I would refuse to let that energy touch my new son. I was protective and would say things like, “No, you can’t use me to hurt him. Love and kindness I will transmit. Positive energy and advice I will let you share with him and the family, but not your pain, hurt and rage.” Like a good medium I established my boundaries with the spirit. Then books would almost fall off the shelves. I would read them and ask the Wolf about them. He would weave the stories of his childhood through the books. That’s how we tapped into his memories of his father. Alexander the Great was his father’s hero. Lord Byron was his father’s favorite poet. These men had enormous shadow sides, ones I knew well. (Byron was the character upon which Mary Shelley constructed her famous Frankenstein monster.  That’s how she knew the bisexual Lord, dark, sinister, hurt, and filled with lust and rage.)  I was the perfect person to attempt to explain the psychology of his father to the Wolf. This was very difficult to do, because he had idealized his father, more out of neglect than love, and that embedded father image was often running his personality.  When his younger brother asked if their dad had ever molested the Wolf, he said no.  Interestingly he didn’t ask his brother why he wanted to know.  Following that scent would have destroyed his image of his Papa, something the little brother needed to discuss.  But that’s when the Wolf’s unconscious survival mechanism kicked in and,  just like his dad would have done, he ignored the obvious.  The Wolf became his dad at that point.  Imagine what the little Wolf would have felt.  That love/hate relationship was right there in the room, and just like dad, my brother is oblivious to my feelings.  Frequently I would ask the Wolf to discuss his feelings with his psychotherapist.  It was a pity the little Wolf wasn’t provided counseling.

Having established a channel between me and the spirit world, I knew that we were dealing with tremendous psychic power which could shake the house down. My spiritual ally and totem animal, the Coyote, was willing to play with the Wolf, so we had five wonderful years as a family. Living with this intense presence from the spirit world was “engaging” to say the least and the Coyote was handling it, or so he thought. But the Shadow had a surprise in store for the wily Trickster. The Dark Side wove itself into the dynamic when the Wolf fell in love with the handsomely dark Romanian “older brother” during an ayahuasca ceremony. The Romanian told me how he was an extraterrestrial and had come to this planet thousands of years ago.  He remembered being a Pharaoh in Egypt. Even within the context of a sacred ceremony using plant medicine, I knew this guy was a force with which to be reckoned, his psyche was skating along the edge of the abyss. I felt he was very dangerous, possibly psychotic, but my son embraced him and brought him into the family.

Like many of the men with whom I work, the Jackal had a troubled youth. Abandoned as a teenager when their parents left him and his younger brother in the family home and never came back, the traumatized Jackal learned to live on the streets. He used and sold drugs, was a gang member, and had a vicious streak. He was overcoming his dark past by detoxing with the help of the sacred Yaje (ayahuasca) ceremonies, doing the Landmark Forum (EST) Training, and enhancing his psychic abilities by working with a couple of elder Gypsy women. To my parochial Western ears these wise women would have been considered witches in Idaho. The Jackal told me these things, when I accepted him as a son. I did my best not to be judgmental, just keep an open mind. We all have done things that weren’t good for us or the people we loved, so who was I to judge him?  He became the older brother of the Wolf. And then the Fox showed up.

The odd thing about family systems is that they tend to replicate themselves. The dead father had three sons. He was extremely critical and harsh with the eldest, the scientist/businessman, who turned to drugs and unusual sexual relationships with women. His attitude was similar with the middle son, the Wolf, who was an athlete, violinist, martial artist, scholar, and did what he was told. He was the MD in the family. Physically he looked out of place, more indigenous with the high cheekbones of a Cherokee boy. I guessed he had some Moorish ancestors, the black Irish, who married the Cherokee women of the eastern seaboard, probably from his mother’s Austrian colonist heritage. The Wolf didn’t look like the Jewish side of the family, nor did he look like the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant side of his mother’s lineage. The youngest brother did look like his mom, and perhaps that was his undoing. The father had a very intimate relationship with him. This was something the older boys did not understand. It was the cause of  their jealousy. Why did the little brother get all their father’s love and attention? When the older boys were off at college, the youngest was the father’s companion and closest friend. The father’s death put the favorite son into a downward spiral of depression and suicidal ideation. Knowing all this it should be no surprise to Coyote that a psychic storm was brewing on the horizon.

The Jackal Anubis entered the drama as the substance abusing, hurt and angry oldest brother. The middle son, the Wolf, was doing his best to be the alpha male in a home filled with women. Even the dogs were female. That was part of the reason he asked his adopted dad to move in. The Coyote could help balance the family by adding another male to the equation. It might have worked if the Matriarch had been consulted first, but the Wolf wasn’t about to do that. She might be his mother, but she wasn’t his friend. That was Papa Coyote’s role, friend, adviser, and confidant. And of course the Wolf didn’t tell the Coyote any of this, he had to discover it by living with the family.  Needless to say, an androgynous critter like Coyote got along well with the ladies, they make very good friends and confidants, something he hoped the Wolf would come to see on his own.

The first year in the mansion on the top of the mountain ran relatively smoothly. We built an Inipi, had Sweat Lodges, and several ceremonies.  The Wolf Matriarch was very open and welcoming of these developments.  She saw the value her beloved son placed on ceremony and wanted him to heal his grief.  (She wasn’t too keen on acknowledging Coyote as his dad.  Wouldn’t that imply an intimate relationship with him?  And how was she to explain this to the Society of University Women?)  The second year brought the world traveling youngest son back in two forms, the “real” blood brother of the Wolf and the spirit brother, the Fox. Psychedelics were the standard fare for all these animals. Each had his favorite, the Coyote, as the eldest, consumed his in a sacred ceremonial setting. He trusted psychic containers. His experiences with substances outside of a safe container had taught him respect for the Unconscious. These were things none of the pups had mastered, especially the youngest, the cunning Fox. I say cunning because he appeared to be a Fool, the odd and simple youngest brother in faerie tales, the one who magically wins in the end. The Fox had returned from an extended visit to India which opened him up sexually.  He entered our family during a Crisis or “Spiritual Emergency”. He decided to take the last of his vial of LSD and had to be rescued. His host family would have put him out on the curb, but he called me in tears, saying “I should have let you adopt me. I want you to be my dad.” It was the 4th of July and the fireworks were bursting in the sky overhead, when he moved into Coyote’s den. The stage had been set for a reenactment of the unconscious family patterns.

The youngest, the prodigal son, had returned with nothing, or so it seemed. All he needed was a place to recover. He was downstairs with dad, getting all the attention again. The Wolf was very busy with his job and young family. Papa Coyote always made time for him, but it wasn’t the same. Where the Coyote could be counted on to baby sit the little wolves when mom went traveling, now there was this bothersome little brother, who seemed to need as much babysitting as the two and four year-olds. It wasn’t fair, not what the Wolf had bargained for. The good part was that the Fox bought tickets to Burning Man, with his mysterious magic BofA card. The Wolf had never been to the famous California phenomenon, so he happily abandoned his wife and daughters to the mansion on the mountain top, they would be fine. Our traveling companion and guide was a veteran Burner. Another Coyote, he had been to 14 successive “burns” after synchronistically showing up on the beach during the first ceremony in San Francisco. He also happened to be a Sun Dancer, who conducted ceremonies. He was the Doorman at my first peyote ceremony in 1998. He wasn’t as dangerous as the Jackal, but he had a similar family dynamic. In fact consciously he was the good side of Anubis. His dark (shadow) side was not yet integrated into his personality. He didn’t like himself and saw that part of himself projected onto the younger, irresponsible and crazy psychedelic twenty four-year-old Fox. The jealous sparks were flying. Papa Coyote retreated to the trailer and let things fall into place.

Returning from Burning Man accentuated the family pattern. We acted it out. The Fox ran home to his fundamentalist Christian parents. The source of his magic BofA card turned out to be a marriage of convenience, lowered tuition for married students coupled with insincerity. He didn’t bother to tell his parents that they overpaid his senior year’s tuition by $10,000, nor that he was married. He just deposited the money in the Bank of America. With his dad’s frequent flier miles, he had flown to India for a two week vacation with his father figure, a Tantric yoga instructor. It was a graduation gift for his BS degree. Typical of such cunning creatures, he stayed in India for six months. His father and mother neither questioned how he did it, nor what he was really doing in India. They just wanted him back. I believed him when the Fox told me that his dad was bi-polar a few years before. That was why he never answered his dad’s phone calls when we were together. That was before the India trip. When he finally ran out of money (10 weeks after moving in), his parents bought him a one way ticket home, and to his surprise, an opportunity to “re-program” his mind, to exorcise him of the devil’s influence. Needless to say, none of us have seen him since he left the mansion. Our spirit family never returned to normal.  The Fox had left his mark.

The Fox introduced Papa Coyote to Ecstatic Dance, where you can move as the spirit suggests or commands.  This opened the Gates of Perception a little wider, something the Fox hadn’t counted on.  Papa Coyote was fully enabled to be himself in the world of modern dance.   Coyote regressed by falling into his past, the familiar music and liturgy of the Episcopal Church.  These services were somewhat surprisingly conducted by women.  The old Celtic priestess was back running the ceremonies, and her helpers were part of the LGBT community.  Now that was interesting.   Papa Coyote started hanging out with graduate students in theology.  Many of these were people of ambiguous sexual orientation, and one of them, a gay Roman Catholic monk, was frequently seen entering and leaving Coyote’s den. Perfect timing for Anubis, the Jackal, who turned on a dime and began to destroy his brother’s relationship with their Papa. Of course this was all unconscious. He had the best of intentions in poisoning his brother with fear and jealousy. His psychic abilities told him that something was hidden.  What exactly was the Coyote doing down in his den with the Fox and later with the monk? Look at the forty year difference, the age differential. Was the Fox feeding dad the LSD or was it the other way around? Was the Coyote really the Trickster? If so then imagine the legends of Coyote, he certainly wouldn’t be a good influence on any family, would he?

And that’s how the Shadow side of the Law Professor became enabled within the Wolf. He listened to the poisonous words. He didn’t talk to Papa Coyote about his brother’s accusations.  There was nothing hidden from the Wolf.  He knew all of Coyote’s story.  Why hide anything from someone who loves you?   He asked where the Fox was sleeping and was told the truth, in Coyote’s bed.  He was a little surprised at the time, but accepted it.  That is part of the Coyote’s legend.  I guess the Wolf felt like he made a mistake.  The Jackal told him he had.  That moment of distrust had allowed the Dark Lord to possess Wolf. Coyote didn’t see it coming, he was blind sighted.

On his way out of the story, Coyote had a council with the Wolf Matriarch, the widow of the Professor. She validated the picture. Her husband was indeed extremely harsh, cold, and cruel to her. He was rejecting, disrespectful, not worthy of trust, blaming and abusive. But she was stronger. She endured and conquered in the end. She owned the house, had a huge inheritance, was independent financially, and had a career of equal stature to her husband. His emotional immaturity was part of the deal. She had learned to master it and her sons’ outrageous behavior could also be mastered. She was as crusty as they come, worn down with all that abuse, but not about to be overcome. She was the Queen and that was that. Coyotes and Wolves come and go, but Cherokee Queens rule.

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Healing by Bears

Twenty years ago I attended my first California Bear Dance.  We were visiting my son’s in-laws on the top of Mount Madonna.  In order to get to the family home, we had to drive through hundreds of Native Americans walking to a Pow Wow.  As I slowed our aging station wagon to a crawl, we were surrounded by men and women wearing Indian regalia, colorful feathers, dresses, necklaces and breastplates of woven porcupine quills.  My son, the little Bear, said, “Dad, look at that guy’s choker!”  The young man was walking beside the car and looked in at us.  His necklace was made of very sharp animal teeth.  I recognized him.  He was one of the young men in the Greek folk dance troop whom we had seen dance at the San Francisco Greek festival the week before.  I remembered talking to him.  He was Greek on his dad’s side and Sioux and Tsalagi on his mom’s side.  Wow! indeed, and talk about synchronicity, how often does that happen?  I met the guy and talked about his ancestors not thinking how little Bear was the flip of that, his mom was a Greek bear and his deer dad had the Iroquois/Tsalagi ancestry.

After eating lunch with my eagle son’s Brazilian/American relatives, the little Bear, who wasn’t very little at seventeen, asked if we could visit the Pow Wow.  I told him I would take him.  The two younger boys walked over to the gathering with me.  Little Bear went shopping and visiting.  When he found me and his younger brother, the puma, a while later, he said he had been looking at various objects at a vendor’s stand and the woman invited him to the Bear Dance that night.  He was so excited.  “How did she know I was a bear, Dad?” and “Can we go?” (almost in the same breath).  We walked back, and later that night, he and I returned to watch the Bears healing the sick people.  It was an impressive, spiritual end to our family gathering.  We met most of my older son’s new family and got to see Native Americans dressed in bear skins acting like real bears.  Separating from the rest of the family to re-connect with our Native American roots was a fore-shadowing of my divorce six years later.

After thirty years of marriage and being separated from my momma bear, the deer part of my psyche receded into the background and I morphed into my shadow, the Coyote.  That was when I was teaching Critical Thinking at the community college and I started attending Native American sweat lodges, vision quests, and peyote ceremonies.  At my first Native American Church ceremony, I prayed for a full time job and within two weeks I was hired as the Education Specialist for a local Pomo tribe.  The Secretary of the Tribal Council was at the end of a long line of Medicine Doctors.  Her spirit animal was the bear.  She refused to practice as a Bear Doctor, because it was too hard in our modern times. (She believed her refusing to follow her spiritual calling would lead to her early death.)  Often her Spirit Bear would appear in her dreams.  When that happened, she would seek me out, and tell me how she interpreted the dream and ask my opinion.  Usually the Bear would intervene when she was angry at another tribal member.  She would be planning a vendetta and the Bear would get between her and the family she wanted to hurt.  It would rear up on its back paws and then put its front paws on her shoulders, stopping her dead in her tracks.  She knew that revenge was not good and her Spirit Bear always stopped her.  She listened to the Bear and found other ways to negotiate a peaceful settlement.  But her refusing to follow her spiritual path did eventually lead to her death. She died in her late fifties.

As the Tribal Education Specialist I had the honor of attending Northern California Bear Dances and even went through the process of watching one of our Maidu/Pomo boys become a Bear Dancer.  Last week I attended the Southern California Bear Dance at Muhu Tasen.  I met the young man, whose vision at age four had led to the re-establishment of the Dance. I watched him and seventeen other bears heal me and many others on the first night of the ceremony.  I had no idea of the amount of psychic/emotional stuff I had accumulated from listening to the traumas of my clients in my counseling practice.  The bears did, and they removed it.  I have been feeling much lighter and optimistic ever since.  After five days and four nights of ceremony (the Aztec Dancers joined us the last two nights), we closed the ceremony with prayers and bear hugs.  And as I drove back to my Eagle’s nest atop San Marcos pass, I remembered my first Bear Dance twenty years ago and the gift my Little Bear had given me by reconnecting me with our Bear Roots.

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Coyote’s Synchronous Windfalls

‭My amazingly true and synchronous stories began with the entrance of the Native American Trickster, Coyote. Well that’s not true, or maybe it is, maybe I just didn’t know Coyote was behind me all my life. It is like I have been riding on his magic carpet since I was a child. I just didn’t know who or what to blame for all the crazy dreams, psychic abilities, and unsolicited life stories people told me. Well I guess that’s one of the problems of being a good listener. My Grandfather was a coyote. I used to sit with him and listen to him tell me all sorts of wonderful stories. But no one knew he was a coyote. He never confessed he was. I had to figure that out on my own.

In case you are not familiar with Coyote,‭ ‬I should begin by saying that he/she is a fabulous character in Native American myths and legends.‭ ‬Coyote is a Trickster,‭ ‬who often plays tricks on himself while thinking he is tricking one of our four-legged relatives.‭ ‬A creative spirit,‭ ‬Coyote is the one who made us humans.‭ ‬I guess Coyote was bored one day,‭ ‬so he created us to entertain himself.‭ ‬He amuses himself by putting us into embarrassing situations to see what we will do.‭ ‬Often we surprise him,‭ ‬so he gets a good laugh as he plays with us.‭

My friend,‭ the ‬Roadrunner,‭ ‬said that among his people,‭ ‬the Chumash of Southern California,‭ ‬the Coyote is a Balancer,‭ ‬a Teacher,‭ ‬who “chases you down,‭ ‬jumps on your back,‭ ‬and won’t get off until you have learned the lesson he wants to teach you”.‭ ‬Maybe you need to grow stronger or more humble.‭ ‬Maybe you are neglecting people who need your help or you aren’t listening to your elders.‭ ‬Whatever it may be,‭ ‬Coyote helps you get your feet back on solid ground,‭ ‬walking in balance with the Mother Earth again.‭ ‬Sometimes the lesson has to do with attaining a sense of humor,‭ ‬especially the ability to laugh at your self-importance.‭ ‬Coyote is a powerful deity‭; ‬one to respect and to whom we must listen,‭ ‬because if we don’t,‭ ‬every step we take will be dogged in shit until we smell it and stop to clean off our shoes.‭

Coyote rides us. When we are lucky,‭ ‬he gives us a ride on his tail.‭ ‬You can imagine how small humans are to be able to ride on Coyote,‭ ‬our Creator.‭ ‬And of course,‭ ‬it can be a very tricky business.‭ ‬I think I am speaking metaphorically here about being whisked up by the magic of the Trickster.‭ This‬ magic is available to everyone,‭ ‬if we but take the time to listen.‭ I was reading a book my son gave me called Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster (1996) by Allan Combs and Mark Holland on the bus. It was a rainy, windy day, and I was fascinated by how the inner and the outer worlds can match up. That’s what the authors were saying, that synchronicity establishes a meaningful connection between two mysteries, the “deepest layers of the human mind, about which we really know very little, and an external world in which final causes remain, at best, a mystery to us (p. 101).” Of course all this is also very paradoxical, as is quantum physics. My stop was coming up. I continued reading.
‭As I stepped from the bus, I was reading how the ancient Greeks called synchronicity the activity of the god Hermes, “the Trickster continues to play the devil with us, continually upsetting with his sudden windfalls”. Right then I was pelted with walnuts. The wind was blowing them off the walnut trees and littering the ground. I was grateful to have my umbrella up (covering my book so I could continue reading) as Coyote was throwing hard his little balls of nut meat. I looked around in amazement at the windfalls, thanked Creator, and began picking them up, putting them in the shopping bags I was carrying. And later I cracked them open, chopped the nuts and put them into the baklava

baklava

I was making for my son’s wedding. Hermes/Coyote strikes again. Windfalls indeed!

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The Lady in High Heels

One foggy night in a small northern California town (where I was renting a room from a devotee of the East Indian Punjabi Saint Takar Sing) I went walking in my London fog trench coat. The devotees were still meditating in the living room, so I leaned against the neighbor’s fence enveloped by the overhanging hedge. A thick fog covered the streets. You couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of you, even with the corner street lamp lighting up the night. It was late at night and I heard a couple of people returning from town. The bars must be closed. As their voices climbed the hill in rhythm with the sound of their approaching footsteps, I wondered if they would see me. I recognized one voice, it was Romeo, the Shakespearean actor, one of my college students. He was my youngest son’s age. He and Puma used to play soccer together. Both were excellent actors and dancers, agile on and off the soccer field. Water was dripping from the overhanging Redwood trees. I sunk as deep into the hedge as possible. The approaching men’s voices were strong and carried far. They sounded pretty wasted as they stumbled home. Oh, the folly of youth! How many times did I drink too much beer when I was their age? They turned up the street, never sensing I was standing in the shadows listening to them. Their voices trailed off. I heard a door shut and silence fell around me. It was quiet for a long time.

The silence was broken by the sound of a lady in high heels climbing the gently sloping street. I froze against a hedge. The footsteps were getting closer and she was coming up my side of the street. How could I explain my lurking so quietly? What if I frightened her by moving and she called the police? I decided that if I could fool the boys, there was a chance I could fool her. But the thought of a woman alone at this time of night was spooky. Women don’t walk the streets alone in rural fog filled towns of Mendocino county. She got closer and closer. The footsteps were louder and louder. As she passed me, she turned and looked at me with those huge doe eyes.

 

She was a deer! Her high heels were part of her anatomy!
Evidently she recognized me as a relative and waited for me to follow her. She stayed ahead of me, yet she would wait for me to catch up before moving on. She led me down the deer paths (I thought children had made those paths through vacant lots) to the creek bed where the rest of her family were waiting for her to return. The stag greeted her, turned and led us through the forest single file to a sacred place higher up on the mountain, where I stopped and thanked my relatives for their help. They continued on their way.
Each night from then on I retraced the path of the deer and came to the open space. There I did the moving meditation, the Cherokee Dance of Life, which I learned from my Chi Kung instructor; it reconnected me to the earth. That began a profound shift in my perception. Each time I performed the dance I could ground myself and feel I was one of Mother Nature’s children. I felt at one with the Deer nation as I stood under the Pine Tree.

Brother Coyote

That was before the Coyote appeared and made me confront my Shadow.

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Spirals Going Upward

Sitting in the Bohemia Coffee House, drinking a latte coffee, talking with a yoga teacher, whose ex-lover was sitting at another booth with his new romantic partner, we were joined by a young man exactly 45 years younger than me. He was born on my birthday and so far has had a very similar life, even down to the auto accident at age 23. I just met him and his girlfriend a few months ago. The three of us went to see Cloud Atlas together, picked up Otter, the Upgraded Version of Nataraja, my spirit son, and took him with us. After the show we went to the Thai Restaurant and then mused about the possibility of reincarnation at Starbucks Coffee Shop. Funny how that works.

Both the first spirit son Nataraja and Otter are coyote yogi alchemists with similar histories. I met both in the Native American Church peyote ceremony (ten years apart). Nataraja was so named by his Swami. It means “dancing Shiva”. He danced in and out of my life, rearranging my world, creating havoc, destroying my reputation. I loved that kid and called him my son. Then he and his brother were loaned the Road Chief’s car and they disappeared for a month. He denied knowing where the car was until he returned to my home and we had to “find” it. Thieves are interesting people. He was just the first one. Shiva was the second. Why do they all gravitate to the Hindu tradition? I don’t know, maybe the cannabis trade is like the Silk Road, leading through India. Dancing Shiva stole the car; the other Shiva was a shoplifter. Both were selling illegal substances behind my back and both had been sexually abused in childhood.

Alice Miller discusses how we were  treated in childhood we act out throughout our lives, in an attempt to get some adult to witness the (past) story of abuse.  We need some one to attend to us.  Often our inner child has only behavior with which to speak.  Both of my spirit sons were shouting about their parent’s abuse by acting it out.  No one heard them.  Not until I did. They got my attention. Both of them shared their histories (in all the horrible details), got the unconditional love they needed from me, transferred their negative feelings onto me, the surrogate father, then ran away and hid. That is the childhood pattern they act out.  It is tuff being the “good” father to these men.  They are as cruel as their parents were, and just as unfeeling.  When they don’t come back to process our interactions,  my tendency is to let them go away with the hope they’ll figure all of this out someday.

After two years of distance and silence, I offered (via Facebook) to take Shiva to the movies. When he agreed to see Cloud Atlas with me, I was apprehensive about reconnecting. I have been doing a lot of exorcism work around his Dark Angel in the Santo Daime ceremonies, mostly disconnecting myself from the ancestral influence, which my dad’s royal Scots lineage had introduced into our family many years ago. Feeling protected by Sao Miguel’s flaming sword, I went to Church and then to Krotona Library, where I ran into a beautiful East Indian man and his mother. They had just come from the Krishnamurti Institute and we began talking.  His mother brought up Charles Leadbeater and how he found Juddi in Madras. I was struck by the incredible likeness of her son to the photo of Juddi as an adolescent.  Her son was more buff; he obviously works out in a gym.  The look in his eyes was the same.  The way he regarded me evoked very strong feelings of recognition, love and respect.

Some time ago I considered the possibility of discovering who we might have been in a former life-time. My Christian indoctrination, as liberal as it was, did not embrace reincarnation. Even my dream mentor, James Sanford, argued there was no Biblical basis for the belief. When I discovered that many early Christians did believe in reincarnation and that the Christian Gnostic tradition still does, I also found the Liberal Catholic Church and the writings of one of its founders Charles W. Leadbeater. That was in Ojai, California, where the Theosophical Institute of Esoteric Studies, Krotona Library (founded by Dr. Annie Besant), and the Krishnamurti Foundation are all located. There I was in the Library talking to another Upgrade and his mother, so I pointed to the painting of Leadbeater and told them the story of  how my granddaughters had thought it was their Papou’s portrait hanging in the Krotona Library.  That’s when I went to the Bohemia Coffee House.

Later that night I sat in front of the theater for an hour waiting for Shiva to arrive. He never did. My inner child was hurt. I comforted him. His buddy disappointed him again, but I was there for him this time. And two days later I met up with a new friend I had met at the Bear Dance for a chance to view Cloud Atlas. We talked and went to dinner after the show. We did everything I had hoped for, I told him about Shiva’s vampiric qualities and I was surprised by his observation.  “Yes, I have had relationships with people like that.  They are very seductive. And afterward I would have this strange feeling of being emotionally drained.”

Yes, that is exactly how it felt, somehow I was seduced.  It was fun and I am so tired!  My wife used to say that about me, that I was like Dorian Gray, as described in Barbara E. Hort’s Unholy Hungers: Encountering the Psychic Vampire in Ourselves and Others.  I guess it takes one to know one.  Damn I hate it when that happens!

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Dream Beaver

In a nap before teaching a dream group,  a wet beaver appears, curious looking, it has blond fur, like a golden Labrador retriever.

What does the dreamer know and/or associate with the symbol of the beaver?  Beavers are hard working.  They build dams and cut down trees with their large teeth.  Once built, the dam must constantly be repaired.  It serves as a safety feature keeping predators away and as a storage facility for the tree bark, upon which beavers depend for nourishment.  They are water way architects; their dams create habitat for other animals.  With the trees down, bushes grow where deer can forage in the meadow surrounding the pond.  When the pond fills up with silt, rich fertile farm land remains for humans to grow vegetables, beans, corn (maize), and squash, the three sisters of Native American heritage.  The beavers move up or down stream to create new ponds.

As a young boy I saw beavers building a dam in a stream feeding the Snake River.  This was an unusual place to see a beaver, not the Wind River of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, but four hundred feet below the farmland of Magic Valley where the desert bloomed from water transported through irrigation canals.  The River cuts a channel through the ancient lava flow as it snakes its way across southern Idaho.   After crashing over the Twin Falls and descending one hundred feet, the Snake takes another plunge over Shoshone Falls about three hundred feet more, straight down.  Deep in the canyon A. B. Perrine established a ferry across the Snake River for people traveling the Oregon Trail in the 1800s.  In the 1950s the beavers were building their dam in that canyon where pure spring water gushed forth from artesian wells.  Resourceful humans built a golf course on the beavers’ territory and called it Blue Lakes Country Club after the crystal clear lakes in the canyon.  During that time in my life I was building friendships, beginning my studies of esoteric religious traditions, and plotting a way to get out of red neck fundamentalist Idaho.

Then I had another dream.  I had just moved to Venice Beach, California and was surveying my back yard.  There was an open channel with straight concrete walls where the water could flow out from a drainage tunnel.  Suddenly there was a surge of water deep green in color, like a giant spiralina algae farm upstream had suddenly burst its containment field.  It overflowed as I stood there and washed up a chest on the far side and a pile of logs for firewood on my side before it receded.

The image of the channel appeared on the cover of the New York Times today, a subway tunnel under the East River was being pumped of green water.  I looked up beavers in Ted Andrews’ book Animal Speak (1993) and discovered that “their homes can have intricate canals” (p. 253).  I knew they had close-knit families, having seen a documentary on beavers and that the underwater entrances to their dens were safe from wolves, coyotes and foxes during winter when the ponds freeze over.  Beavers have a frozen crust of snow and ice for their roofs, which also provides insulation.  Very clever adaptation to their environment, swimming pools in the summer, retreat centers in winter.

On my way to see Cloud Atlas (again) with my coyote nephew, I got a call from a newly adopted niece.  Could she and her boyfriend join us?  Yes, of course.  When I told her the canal dream and the beaver research, she confessed that her first stuffed animal was a beaver.  It is blond in color now that it is 20 years old.  She said her favorite animal is the beaver and she has a huge collection of stuffed beavers.  After the movie while drinking tea and hot Thai soup, she discovered that my coyote nephew (the upgrade I wrote about) has the same birthday as hers.  His surprise was to discover that her boyfriend and I have the same birthday as one another.  It was fun watching how the two Taurus people mirrored one another sitting cross legged, Buddha style or crouching in their chairs, while the two Capricorns sat upright in the same way, anchored to the floor.

Synchronicity and the dream world remind us to look deeply at events, and set to work writing, building dream dams, and reconfiguring reality.  And there we were, the newly formed, close-knit spirit family making plans for future get-togethers.  What would a beaver serve for Thanksgiving?  Aspen pie with Birch bark whipped topping?  Hum, I think I’ll stick with the traditional turkey and pumpkin fare.

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My Father, the Coyote

Twice during ceremony, while we were singing Native American songs in the Tipi, the coyotes circled us and added their voices under the light of the moon. We were joined by the animal natives of our upper mountain valley, the ones who have been here longer than the humans, and no doubt will out last us as well. I was telling this story to a young father, who was three hundred miles north of me, when I felt the impulse to open my cabin door. Directly in my field of vision, about two hundred yards away was our friend the coyote walking down the ridge line. He was looking directly at me as he walked and then disappeared into the underbrush. I felt an incredible connection to my brother the coyote at that moment, sort of telepathic, given the story the young father was telling me.

The son’s attempted reconciliation with his father ended when his dad pulled a knife and threatened to kill his son. The young man had a foreshadowing dream of this happening and the stool from the dream was conveniently sitting where he could pick it up to defend himself. He acted according to the dream’s action and stopped the fight, refusing to continue. This all had come up because the father refused to process the son’s feelings. Dad didn’t want to talk about his abusive behavior, but the son refused to travel across country with his estranged father unless they could talk about their relationship. Nothing had changed for the father in twenty years. He was still solving confrontations with violent threats and action. The son walked away from the fight and drove across the continent. He would call and give me an update of his travels. But today he was recounting last night’s dream in which his father was listening to him. He was arguing verbally with his father, telling him how he felt, without a violent reaction from the father.

I was impressed with his inner world’s transformation. He had flown across the USA to repair his relationship with his father and when the “real” father refused to cooperate, the “imaginal” father said yes. The internalized image of the biological father is called an “introject” in my lineage. We “shoot or throw” our experiences with our parent inside ourselves as we grow up. When the parent dies or refuses to enter dialogue with us, we can still engage the inner image. We can educate the father “imago” who dwells within us. If we record his words like a movie script and write our response, we honor the father/son relationship within us. His voice may remain silent for a while. Perhaps he’s sulky and withdraws to his inner sanctuary, his den, or gets on his motorcycle and drives away like he always used to do. But if we remain steadfast and wait patiently, he shows up and tells us how terrible we are, judging and blaming us again. We have to write down all that abuse, honoring our father’s words and feelings, and then respond. In that way we get the dialogue to continue. Perhaps it continues in the imaginal world of dreams like it did for my young friend. What is amazing about this process is that we can witness our own process by reading and re-reading our journal. We can see how we have changed and how “Dad” has changed.

Sometimes there is a change in the outer world when we do the inner work. I remember a story told by a therapist about a mother who finally let go energetically/emotionally of her son after a long analysis. The therapist didn’t expect to hear from her client again as it was the final session. But the client showed up a couple of weeks later just to tell her friend and therapist that the son had felt a great weight drop off of him half way across the planet. He sent a telegram time-dated in Denmark (right after the mother’s therapy session) that he felt safe to return to the USA and wanted to see his mother. Working on the inner son imago had a psychic effect on the outer world, just as working on the inner father imago can have. If we do the work for ourselves, our attitude changes and the “psychic” dynamic does also.

Opening the door to the magic sometimes discloses amazing synchronicity. That’s when the coyote appears!

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