Vision Quest

“But, Sue, here’s the thing.  You made a commitment.”

 

Ouch.  Did I?  Really?

Granted, I signed a contract with a spiritual teacher to fulfill certain requirements of a 13-moon program.  At the start, we reviewed each bullet point together.  I understood each one, and I signed on the dotted line.  One of the points was that if I chose to leave the program prematurely, that I would pay for the entire program in full.  No problem.

Well, five months into an intense immersion of twice-monthly sweat lodges, New Moon and Full Moon ceremonies, monthly Sacred Hoops gatherings, two Medicine Wheel ceremonies, a Moon Dance that spanned five days including preparation, supporting a Vision Quest that spanned seven days including preparation (all of which required at least a 90-minute round-trip drive and a $5 bridge toll), as well as the making and fringing of a Native American shawl and the reading of three books, I burned out.  I decided to call it quits.  It was all great medicine, intense medicine, but in the process, I was feeling cut off from other aspects of my life.  I had stopped writing, stopped painting, had foregone a fair amount of work that this self-employed person would have otherwise had time for, and I was missing outings with friends.

Don’t get me wrong.  My teacher was more than fulfilling his end of the agreement.  Perhaps a little too much so for my Western, colonized blood.  I was accustomed to “pick and choose” spirituality, not such deep indigenous immersion.  At 52, I had attained a lovely satisfaction with who I was and with who I was becoming.  For the previous eight years, I had done what I considered an extensive amount of healing and clearing out through various other spiritual and energetic modalities.  I had gained awareness of my patterning, my shadow, and had learned effective tools and garnered excellent resources to further my quest.

Yet during this five-month immersion, something was different.  My teacher was very emphatic regarding adherence to protocol.  His protocol.  Now, I understand the significance and necessity of protocol.  It is a strict and (ideally) uniform way of performing ceremony that takes into account energy flow and energy balance.  Protocol determines the difference between order and chaos.  And by God, there was a lot of it.  I had bristled at the whole notion of protocol at the very beginning of my program and had voiced misgivings about it early on.  Being told how to do something and subsequently corrected if I forgot was tough for this Catholic-raised 52-year-old who had a very hard time distinguishing between protocol and dogma.  After all, protocols differ from family to family in Native American circles, so clearly they are not absolute.  I began to feel increasingly frustrated and confined; very much how I felt sitting, standing, and kneeling in the pews of the church throughout my childhood.  I came to realize I had a very intractable streak of rebellion against being told where to stand, where to sit, how to sit, not to step over tipi poles, and, most significantly, how to pray.

Prayer is sacred.  Prayer is personal.  In this tradition, people pray out loud.  I respect that.  And to a degree, I have become comfortable with praying out loud, and I see the value of it.  But only to a degree.  There are some things I am simply too uncomfortable sharing out loud.  And I was actually told a couple of times that my prayer was not “deep enough.”

So when I finally left a voice mail message for my teacher telling him, “Thank you for everything, this path is no longer for me, and the final check is in the mail,” instead of responding with, “Sorry to see you go,” or even, “May I ask why” and respecting my answer, I was met with, among other things:

“But, Sue, here’s the thing.  You made a commitment.”

Which, for me, brought up a lot of “stuff.”  I guess my teacher viewed my signing the agreement to take on the 13-moon program as “absolutely no way will you drop out, no matter what.”

Well, isn’t it that kind of thinking that has caused so much misery, unhappiness, and oppression in the world?  People doing things they perhaps do not even want to do and without knowing why they’re doing them for the sake of this idea of “commitment”?  Healthy commitment, from where I sit, must be deemed WORTHWHILE by the committing parties.  Not necessarily without difficulty or adversity, mind you, but made and adhered to in the spirit of furthering a higher end.

As far as I was concerned, after five months and girded with a lot more information and experience than I had had at the beginning, the “worthwhile higher purpose” was eclipsed by burdensome detail and perfunctory actions, not to mention some very earthly drama that had appeared nowhere in my contract.

I listened to my teacher for a good 30 minutes as he made his case for why I should not depart the program, which, by the end of his soliloquy, only fueled my desire to depart.

So here I am, days after this exchange, happily writing this blog post at a very cool café in Oakland after having downed two lattes, once again the writer, the artist, the Western gal I truly am, for better or for worse.

Sleeping in the Middle

These days I can only get up on one side of my bed in the morning.  The other side abuts a wall.  So I can be accused of never getting up on the wrong side, or always getting up on the wrong side.  From the way things have been going lately, it’s been feeling like the right side.  A modicum of peace and stability reigns.  When drama arises, it’s relatively short-lived and fairly well contained.

This hasn’t always been the case.  When I’ve shared a bed with a partner, life was, not surprisingly, more complicated.  The beds themselves posed issues.

My ex-husband brought a king-sized water bed into my life.  Let’s call this bed “Betty.”  Betty sounds cool and rather hip, but for me, she was not.  While I did manage to get some sleep on Betty, she never felt secure.  Betty felt amorphous, weird, unstable, awkward.  And sex?  Not going there.

I always had to think about what I put on top of Betty so as to avoid puncturing her with sharp objects and pointy edges.  Like cats’ claws, for instance.  Then there was always the fear of the disaster that would ensue if that unthinkable puncture or leak did occur.  I quietly dreaded the day when Betty would have to be moved.  Betty required special treatment. 

My next bed partner and I shared a queen-sized bed, regular mattress.  He had a penchant for sleeping on flannel sheets year-round, which I also acquiesced to.  Several problems here.  First, flannel sheets are not easy to move around on or between.  Lots of friction.  Combine that with overheating and sweat, and you’ve got a sticky flannel mess.  I was constantly throwing the blankets and top sheet off of me to cool down.

My flannel partner was also a sprawler.  Invariably he would encroach on my sleep space during the night with limbs and/or by rolling over to the point that by morning, my body precariously bordered the edge of the bed.  The urge to push gently back (okay, maybe not so gently sometimes) was often met with annoyance at having been woken up.  Spooning would have made the scenario much more comfortable and romantic, but the inclination towards such a “lemons to lemonade” adventure never seemed to manifest. 

Since this relationship’s end, I have lived and slept alone, but for the boyfriend spending the occasional night.  Fortunately this arrangement precludes chronic bed-sharing issues.  And when they do arise, I am relieved they are temporary, and I am once again left with the luxurious freedom to choose sleeping in the middle of my queen-sized bed with white cotton sheets.