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Dr. Hank Wesselman came to the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in February, 2004 to
discuss his book Spirit Medicine: Healing in the Sacred Realms. Dr.
Wesselman's co-author for this book is his wife, transpersonal medical
practitioner Jill Kuykendall. In Spirit Medicine, they present us with a
cross-cultural consideration of illness, healing, and health care from the
ancient wisdom of the traditional peoples. Spirit Medicine provides you
with the singular key to success that energy medicine by itself lacks. It
will also provide you with a perspective derived from the Hawaiian kahuna
tradition, of which knowledge of the soul cluster, as well as the
multileveled nature of reality, forms a foundation. Included with the book
is an experiential CD.
Dr. Hank Wesselman is a scientists, anthropologist, shaman and professor.
His work reflects his warm-hearted humanity, erudition, and startling
experiences. In person, he is an extraordinary and engaging story teller
and conversationalist. For information about Hank Wesselman and Jill
Kuykendall, you may access their web site:
www.sharedwisdom.com.
The books of Hank Wesselman are:
The trilogy of books describing his mystical journey:
- Spiritwalker (1996)
- Medicinemaker (1999)
- Visionseeker (2001)
His other books are:
- Journey to the Sacred Garden (2003)
- Spirit Medicine: Healing in the Sacred Realms (2004), co-author is Jill Kuykendall
- Little Ruth Reddingford and the Wolf (2004)
HANK WESSELMAN:
I was last at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore some four or five years ago and
I can't believe so many years have slipped by, but it happens.
Have any of you read my unusual trilogy of books:
Spiritwalker, Medicinemaker and Visionseeker?
These books tell the story of how I got into being part of the
transformational community. In my mainstream life, I'm a professor of
anthropology at a couple of colleges where I teach classes on human
evolution, physical anthropology and cultural anthropology. I became an
anthropologist because years and years and years ago, I went in the Peace
Corps. In those days, the Peace Corps was really something. They sent me to
Nigeria, where I lived for two years among members of the Yoruba tribe. I
had come out of the University of Colorado with a degree in zoology, and at
that time, I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do with my degree in
zoology.
Nigeria was a real eye-opener for me
because, in addition to having my first full-fledged immersion in an
indigenous culture, I also had a very exceptional neighbor. I lived next
door to a traditional African witch doctor. Now "witch doctor" was the term
that we used in those days but this man was a shaman, a diviner, and a
healer. He was what they call a "native doctor". We exchanged cigarettes
and goodwill and he was the one who referred me to ceremonies and rituals
that were going on in my town throughout the year.
This had a very
profound effect on me. I'm a native New Yorker but nothing growing up in
New York prepared me for the ceremonies that I encountered in Africa. I saw
things that are very, very difficult to explain, even from the perspective
of science, for example, spirit possession. I remember one day being at a
ceremony and this guy went absolutely wild. His eyes were completely red.
All of his clothes came off. Before you know it, he's going around with
this steak knife, and he stuck this steak knife into his body and he's
pulled a loop of his intestines out, and he's running around displaying
this. Then the intestines go back in again, and fifteen minutes later, you
couldn't see where it had happened. I've seen water turned into wine, and
wine back into water again. These African tribal people could bend the laws
of physics. I saw it happen and I couldn't explain it and this is where I
got interested in anthropology. So when I came back from Nigeria, I ended
up at UC Berkeley, which was a very tribal experience in the late 1960s. I
was at People's Park and I consider myself a "Refugee from the sixties".
But while I was at Berkeley, I attracted the eye of a very, very well-known
professor in paleoanthropology, and he looked at my zoology background and
he said, "I have a project for you to do for your dissertation. How would
you like to go out in a tented safari camp 600 miles from the nearest cold
beer or hot bath for three months at a time, looking for fossils relevant
to the origins of humanity? Human evolution." Now, if somebody asked you if
you wanted to do that, what would you say? This was a graduate student's
dream come true. I found myself rubbing elbows with Dr. Louis Leakey and
his wife Mary and their son's Richard and Philip, Philip the Pirate. In the
field camp, I shared a tent for two seasons with Don Johannson, the guy who
found Lucy. We were graduate students together. And in fact, I still do
this work today. I'm currently involved with Professor Tim White in a
research expedition up north of Addis Ababa in Northeastern Ethiopia, where
we're currently uncovering sediments between four and six million years
old. We are recovering the fossilized remains of an early kind of human,
which is so primitive that we may in fact have found the famous missing
link that Charles Darwin predicted we would find eventually. This is like
the Holy Grail of anthropology. And we've got a skeleton, which is a
million and a half years older than Lucy.
That's what I do in my
ordinary reality life. And it was out there in the deserts of Ethiopia that
I began to have spontaneous visionary experiences. I think it was the lack
of scotch that did it. I'd get terribly tired of the camp food and there
was nothing to drink, and I would eat less and less and I'd get thinner and
thinner. And we're living in the desert, and I began to have these classic
out-of-the-body experiences. One night I remember drifting through the
screen of my tent without zipping it open. I'm sort of hovering over the
field camp, and I could see all of the tents of all of my colleagues and
they were surrounded by these kind of interesting halos of light. I could
see jackals digging up our garbage at the garbage pit. I could see the
soldiers patrolling at the fire pit. And then there was one colleague I
really didn't like. Now I remember experimenting and doing Red Baron
routines and strafing his tent with joyous abandon, and it would feel so
good to be taking care of this bugger at last that I'd come around for
another round. Ehhhhhh. Well, I thought that these were dreams, until one
day, one of the African tribal men walked up to me while I'm brushing my
teeth at the water tank. He looks at me and he says, "Hey, Dr. Hank, what
were you doing flying over my tent last night?" This got my attention. My
consciousness was beginning to open, but I was just in my early thirties at
that time, and I wasn't ready. So I made cryptic notes to myself in my
field notes and closed them. This isn't the sort of thing you share with
your colleagues.
Ten years later, when Spiritwalker begins, my
wife and I were living in Berkeley. She was eight months pregnant and she
was just about to give birth to our daughter a month later. All of her
ligaments were loosening up in preparation for birth-giving. I wake up at
4:00 in the morning and there she is, reading. She's so uncomfortable she
can't sleep. And of course, she was magnificent as well. So I immediately,
you know, hupped to and I said, "Here, let me help you get back to sleep,"
and I started to massage her long back and her hips and of course, the
magic that touch creates progressed into a joyous marital encounter. Maybe
that's the male solution to everything. At the end of this wonderful
experience, I was completely blissed out and I remember, stretching and
preparing to go back to sleep, and my wife was still very uncomfortable and
she was turning the pages of her book. And as I'm slipping down into
slumber, suddenly this feeling comes into my body. The easiest way to
describe this feeing is to describe the feeling that you get when you're on
a swing with very long ropes. Now those of you who have small children know
what this feels like because you've been on swings recently. When you're
swinging down and up into this heady arc, your body fills with this rush of
feeling. Do you remember it? Well, it was like this rush of feeling came
into my body, except instead of coming to the top of the arc, it's like
somebody was turning up the rheostat, and suddenly I was completely
paralyzed with this incredible sensation running through my body. I could
not move my hands, couldn't move my jaw. I could just barely blink my eyes.
The room sort of darkens and I black out. I immediately find myself
precipitated into a place in which I was standing in a dark forest at
night. There were trees all around me. I had black on black. That's the
best way to describe it. But I could see the trees, and there was a very
faint fragrance in the air that made me realize that they were jacaranda
trees. I discovered that thought was movement. If I wanted to look at
something, I kind of floated over to it and looked at it. While I was in
this state, I could hear my wife turn the page of her book. I could feel my
body lying in bed next to her and I was aware of her lying next to me, but
my conscious awareness was someplace else. It was in this state that I had
a face-to-face encounter with what traditional people would call a spirit.
Now, nothing in my anthropology training at Berkeley prepared me for this
experience. I was faced with this huge, dark silhouette that came up
straight from the ground, that came in at the shoulders, and then there was
a little head on top. It came to me that this-whatever this was-might be
the source of the feelings that I was feeling. And with that thought, the
rheostat started to go up. And if I could have screamed, I would have
screamed. It was so incredible there is almost no way to describe it. I was
very gently picked up off the ground and rotated in space with this
incredible power. I was being shown what power is. Mystical power. And then
I was very gently put back down again and then slowly the form dissolved.
It became an ordinary shadow under the trees. The trees dissolved and I'm
back in bed next to my wife in Berkeley. And I sit up and she's asleep. I
needed to talk to somebody and I needed to talk to somebody right then, but
I waited. And that next morning, we talked about it.
A week later
I had another one. About six months later, I had a real beauty just to make
sure I was paying attention, in which I was literally taken on a cosmic
tour of the universe. I was shown incredible things. I was shown a place,
for example, where there were two stars in the sky. They were not the same
size. And they cast interesting double shadows behind objects in the
foreground. I saw lunar landscapes which were completely lifeless with
mountains glittering in the distance and gray ashy plains. I saw unusual
plant and animal forms, which I had no idea what they were and as a
scientist, I've got a very good working knowledge of animals and plants of
this particular planetary system. At the end, once again, I was placed back
in my bed at Berkeley. I didn't know what to do with this. But I began to
read, because my first response was as a scholar. I knew that there were
people in tribal societies called shamans, who claimed to be able to access
altered states of consciousness through hallucinogens, through drumming,
through rattling, through exhaustion, through fasting, or through praying.
I suspected that I was having spontaneous shamanic-like experiences, but I
couldn't turn them on again. There was nothing I seemed to be able to do. I
took some workshops from Michael Harner. [Michael Harner's Foundation for
Shamanic Studies can be accessed at www.shamanism.org] I also took some
workshops with Sandra Engerman. But these workshops didn't help me turn it
on again.
In 1985, my wife and I moved to Hawaii with our first
daughter. I was teaching there for the University of Hawaii at Hilo on the
West Hawaii campus. We lived on a small farm. We had coffee, bananas,
mangoes, and four kinds of avocados including those big cannonball
avocados. Mmm. And the mango trees. Each tree has a crown about twice the
size of this room, and they're the big Hayden mangoes. I had lichees. Fresh
lichees! I was doing the Hawaii project, in which I was going to restore
this property, sell it and move on, because that's one of the ways in which
I was making my money in those days. About six months into the Hawaii
project, one morning at 4:00 am, this strange sensation appeared in my
body. I had been waiting for this. I managed to turn over onto my back
before it hit, but when it hit, once again, I couldn't move a muscle. I was
completely paralyzed. I know that some of you in here know what this is
like. On this particular occasion, I was looking out the window at the
stars and wondering what was happening to me. All of a sudden, I could see
the stars coming in the windows, and suddenly the room was gone and I was
out in the stars. I was traveling along a line of light, like a monorail,
towards an interesting crescent that looked like the new moon. And when I
went through it with this flash of sensation, I blacked out, for lack of a
better term. And when my conscious awareness clicked on again, I was in
somebody else's body. Now there's still a side of Hank the scientist that
steps back whenever I say that to people, because it sounds so incredible.
But in fact, it was true. It was much like spirit possession, except I was
the spirit doing the possessing. Now the man in whose body I found myself,
I discovered almost immediately that I could listen to his thoughts and
feel his feelings. I could pluck stuff out of his memory banks. I could see
his world through his eyes and I was looking out at a world I'd never seen
before. I learned that his name was Nainoa and that he was a servant. He
was a clerk for a ruling chief of a land division somewhere on the western
coast of North America. But what I was looking at were tropical landscapes
with huge buttress-rooted trees. It was a dry season rain forest with some
of the trees losing their leaves and so forth and so on. I was looking at a
community that was oriented like the spokes of a wheel. Not a grid like we
do, but which had a center with the paths, the roads going out in all
directions. All the cleared fields were out beyond the community itself. It
was arranged like a wheel, like a radial pattern. And beyond it was this
completely immense rain forest with trees bigger than I had ever seen
before in Africa.
Now, this is where the book Spiritwalker begins.
This man Nainoa is living on the western coast of North America,
approximately 249 generations after the collapse of the "Great Age". I
didn't know what the "Great Age" was, but he did. And from his memories, I
was able to discern that the "Great Age", most likely, is Western
civilization. And when you multiply out 249 generations, it comes out to
roughly 4,900 years. Now to say, once again, to say I was surprised would
be an understatement of vast proportions. I went into shock. And
Spiritwalker is the story of four years of my life in Hawaii in which I had
twelve episodes of connection with this man as he left his community and
engaged on a voyage of geographic investigation into the lost continent of
America. He's the descendant of Hawaii voyagers who arrived in a fleet of
double-hulled canoes, roughly 130 years before, and they've set up camp.
They've set up settlements around what they call the "Inland Sea" which is
most likely the San Joaquin Valley. It looks like greenhouse warming's
worst case scenario, in which California is covered with tropical rain
forest and there are crocodiles in that San Joaquin Valley, for starters,
and jaguars and iguanas and pythons, boa constrictors and toucans and
parrots. It's unbelievable. But this is what I was seeing. The first time I
was merged with this man was for eighteen hours of his time. During that
time, I learned a tremendous amount about him and his people. When the
episode came to an end, it was like changing channels on a television set,
and suddenly my consciousness reformed in my own body again, lying next to
my wife in bed in Kona.
Over the next four years, I had these
ongoing connections with this man Nainoa. I describe my experiences in a
trilogy of books-one very long story in three books. Spiritwalker came out
in 1996, and it was the first book that I talked about when I came here to
the Bodhi Tree many years ago. The second book in the series is
Medicinemaker. The third book, Visionseeker, was published in 2001. If I've
got this right, and I believe that I do, this man Nainoa is one of my
descendants. In fact, he's one of my descendant selves! You all know what
that means. When that first book came out, I kind of held my breath
because, on the one hand, I had my scientific colleagues. They kept silent.
They survived Carlos Castenada so they can survive me. Besides, I'm sitting
on this huge pile of data and they want my data so I'm actually in a very
good power position with them. But on the other hand, there's a great deal
of kahuna knowledge published in this trilogy. I knew that sooner or later,
the kahuna families were going to come to look me over because I'm an
outsider. What's worse, I'm an anthropologist and anthropologists are
considered as vermin by many traditional people. There was a time when
every Navajo family in Arizona had an anthropologist camped in their
backyard recording when they went to the outhouse, what they had for
breakfast. Everybody was doing their dissertation research on the Navajos
and it drove them crazy.
In 1996, I was invited to speak at The
New Millenium Institute on the Big Island of Hawaii, where my wife and I
continue to do workshops today. This was the very first time we made
connection with them. At that time, the Institute was housed in a Frank
Lloyd Wright house-a hemicycle home built overlooking all the great
volcanos of the Big Island. The Kohala Mountains were behind us. Mauna Kea
was here. Mauna Loa was there. Hualalai was over there. And of course, if
you strained a little bit, you could see Haleakala across the strait on
Maui around the corner. So this is a dramatic place. And on that day, I
came to give a talk. I talked about the transformational community from the
perspective of an anthropologist. It was my academic talk and I was
prepared. I was just about to begin my talk when the door opened, and in
walked this big Hawaiian man. He had a big white ponytail down his back and
a big white beard down his chest. And he was carrying a stick in front of
him. This is a ko'oko'o in Hawaiian, or a walking stick. His stick came
from Rarotonga on a double-hulled canoe 300 years ago with his ancestor.
This man and I have since become great friends and he gave one to me-a copy
of his stick. But this was our first meeting. He came in with four more
large Hawaiians, but they had their wives with them. This was a good sign.
But I was pretty nervous because I had trespassed and I trespassed big
time. My hosts, Suzanne and Sandy Sims, introduced me to this man. This
man's name was Hale Makua. Hale Kealohalani Makua. Seventh generation
descendant of King Kamehameha. Seventh generation descendant of High Chief
Keoua Kuahu'ula, who was the one who Kamehameha killed to become paramount
chief himself. There isn't anyone else in Hawaii who has this kind of
genealogy. This just wasn't any kahuna who came to hear me speak. It was
the big kahuna! Now, this is a very good time to have spirit helpers. I
breathed a silent prayer to my spirit helpers and I launched into my talk.
The Hawaiians sat and watched me while I talked.
At the end of my
talk, I looked over at Makua. He was only three years older than me, but he
was my elder. And I said, "Makua, I've been talking for an hour and a half.
I have this feeling that there's something you'd like to say." Now, Makua
is a man who traveled with 27 generations of his ancestors in constant
attendance with him. They're always with him. So he kind of leaned over as
though somebody's speaking in this ear, then he kind of leaned over as
though somebody's speaking in his other ear, then he smiled and he stood
up, and he looked at me and he said, "A friend of mine sent me your book
and I read it." There was complete silence in the room. This was like high
noon in Polynesia and you could have heard a pin drop in the room. He said,
"I read it again just to make sure I got it right. Then I went down to the
beach and I put your book down in the sand and I called in the ancestors,
and we had a talk about you." He looks at me and he says, "The ancestors
asked me what your name is, and I told them, 'His name is Wesselman. Hank
Wesselman.'" Then he smiled and he said, "The ancestors told me I wasn't
pronouncing your name right." Now I'm going to say something from a place
of sharing, not from a place of ego. He looked at me and he said, "The
ancestors told me that your name is Vesselman, like the canoe." And he's
looking at me to see if I'm getting it yet, and I'm slowly going into
shock, because I had been standing there preparing myself to be condemned.
He would have been fully in his rights to say, "Look, you're not Hawaiian.
Stop writing about us." There are a lot of people, good-intentioned people,
who have written books on Huna. For starters, Huna is not the name of the
Hawaiian spiritual tradition, so whenever you read a book on Huna, it's
inevitably derived from Max Freedom Long and other sources, and it's not
the deep knowledge of the kahuna mystics of Polynesia because that has
never been written down. Well, I was standing there preparing to be
condemned, and I didn't know this, but Makua was very psychic and he pulled
these words right out of my mind without me saying them. And he said,
"Don't worry, we Hawaiians don't write. We talk. And we share what we find
in our hearts with each other, but in your tradition, in your culture, it's
the tradition to write. And so I've been instructed to say to you in front
of these people here, by the ancestors. The ancestors have told me to say
this to you. They told me to tell you that everything you wrote in your
book is true. And we Hawaiians support you. Keep spreading the word. You're
making my job easier." The tension release in the room was incredible.
People were weeping, because this virtually never happens. The indigenous
people so rarely endorse outsiders, because it's not their responsibility
to do that. This man and I became great friends, and over the years that we
knew him, my wife and I, every time we went to the Islands, we would stay
with him and his wife. Over the years, this man started filling me with his
incredible knowledge. And he let me know in no uncertain terms, first, that
it was never to be published but some of it gets shared at my workshops.
But he was really giving me this knowledge, because he was aware of the
fact that this man Nianoa who lives in the future, has access to my
thoughts when the process happens in reverse, which it does. There are
times when I become aware of his presence within me, and I know he's here
looking at my world through my eyes. He is recovering lost knowledge from
the past, which can be of use to his people in the future. And since he's a
historian, he's particularly interested in Hawaiian or Polynesia stuff.
This is where Makua was at his best. He was a wisdom-keeper. He had deep
wisdom. And so he was filling me with this wisdom and he knew that this man
would tap into my thoughts and recover this knowledge from my mind. Is that
a strange relationship or what? Berkeley? Ph.D.? Anthropology? Forget it.
This is applied anthropology and way beyond any of this.
This
spring [2004], my wife and I went to the New Millennium Institute to do a
Visionseeker I workshop, a week-long training workshop for folks like
yourself, in which we get people in touch with their inner places of wisdom
and power, their spirit helpers and teachers. We talk about the way the
self is put together from the kahuna perspective. The kahunas believe, for
example, that we don't have just one but that we have three distinct souls.
This belief is shared by the Inuit, the Lakota, the Cherokee, voodoo
practitioners, the Yoruba, as well as tribes in the Amazon but suppressed or
"excised out" in Western spirituality.
We also do a lot of
ancestral work at these workshops. Years ago, I invited Makua to come to
these workshops in Hawaii and he was in the habit of dropping in. Sometimes
he would come and talk for six hours without stopping but everybody would
be so entranced by what he was saying, nobody dared to get up because they
were so afraid they'd miss something he was talking about. On the evening
of the last evening of the workshop in March, we had a "Kava" ceremony
which is a sacred ritual not offered to tourists at luaus. It's the sacred
ceremony of Polynesia about reconnection with the ancestors. The sacred
drink is 'ava, what we would call kava or kava-kava. As each person
receives their cup of kava they have to chant their ancestors, to honor
them as far back as they can go. Then they have to say who they are and who
they're becoming. And when they drink their cup of kava, they become a holy
woman or a holy man from that time forward for the rest of their life. Now
when you've become a holy woman or a holy man, that's initiation big time
and you live your life differently after that. These are very interesting
events for Western people to have.
On the last night of the
ceremony, Makua and I sat next to each other on the mat and it was just a
fabulous ceremony with incredible power. We had a wonderful evening meal
together and after the meal, we had a big party. All the Hawaiians changed
out of their traditional clothes and they stayed with us and we're all
drinking beer together and telling stories and having fun. Makua says, "I
want to show you something." He takes me out to his car and there's this
light drizzle. We're sitting out there in his car, and I can see people
looking out the window to see what we're doing out there. He had this ream
of paper and he was showing it to me, and it was covered with names,
handwritten names that he was writing down. He was recording his genealogy
and he said, "I want to give this to you when it's done." And I said,
"Well, how far back does the genealogy go?" He says, "It goes back to
Lono." The god Lono was his ancestor. In fact, the original name, the
sacred name of the Island of Hawaii is Lono Nui Akea. That's Lono's island.
And Lono was his ancestor. And I said, "Well, how many generations are you
talking about, Makua?" He said, "1260 generations." Now, if you measure
that out, it comes out to 25,200 years. He had every name in his oral
tradition, in his memory banks. It was the story of human migrations that
went back 25,000 years and included Tibet, Asia, India, Egypt, and Africa.
Now he used to come out with stories like, "Oh, you're descended from Clan
Stewart, which I am." Mary Queen of Scots is one of my ancestors. He said,
"Oh, Clan Stewart, they're descended from the kings of Egypt, from the
pharaohs of Egypt." I said, "How do you know that?" And he would start
reciting names going backwards until he came to that name, which was one of
the kings of Egypt. It didn't take very long because that's not a very long
period of time from Clan Stewart back to classical Egypt. And he said, "I
want to give this to you when it's done." The next day, he was killed in a
car accident. The tourists crossed the divider and killed him instantly.
That ream of paper was never found. It must have been in the car with him,
and it's blowing across the island. We all went into shock when this
happened. We got the news getting off the airplane in Sacramento. When
somebody who is that exalted passes over, it leaves a tear in the fabric of
the universe and that tear hasn't been repaired yet. So on the one-year
anniversary of his death on the 27th of March next year [in 2005], there's
going to be a big ceremony at the Kilauea volcano in which the year of
mourning will be officially ended, and the tear will be repaired. This is
something we're all still dealing with. But in a sense, the chief travels
with me with this stick and provides comfort.
I took the "page
proofs" of Spirit Medicine to Hawaii to show Makua. He loved the color of
the ink. It has a very, very dark sort of not red but a kind of maroon ink.
There are all these Hawaiian quilt designs and petroglyphs scattered
throughout this little book. The chapters are short, some of them are only
two or three pages long. He was quite intrigued with it because the first
third of this little book deals with the three souls from the kahuna
perspective. There is the "oversoul" that divides itself before we come
into life. The "overself" that sends in a seed of its energy and we receive
that seed when we take our first breath. Hah. When we're born, when the
baby emerges from the mother's body and it takes its first breath, that
seed is planted. It comes in from the "oversoul" at that moment. When it
comes into the physical body, there's already a soul "in residence", the
"body soul." And the "body soul" finds its source from mom and from dad.
Because in the same way that there's a genetic template that comes from
mother and father, around and within which the physical body is formed,
there's a spiritual energetic template that comes from mother and father
with the sperm and the egg, and they come together to produce the psycho-
spiritual complex within which that physical body grows. When the
"oversoul" seed comes in, it encounters a soul already there with ancestral
imprints from the mother's and father's lineage. The first thing that has
to happen is a successful meld between the "oversoul" and the "body soul".
There are chapters in the book about how the body soul functions. Between
the "body soul" and the "oversoul", a third soul aspect takes form in
response to life-the "mental soul". It is the soul we call "ego" or
"conscious mind" or "intellect" and it takes form in response to life. And
knowing how these three souls function and come together to produce what we
call the "self" is absolutely essential information if you're to experience
authentic initiation. In order to experience authentic initiation, you have
to know who you are. And so the first eight chapters of Spirit Medicine is
concerned with the knowledge about the "oversoul", the "body soul", the
"mental soul", the human spirit, the matrix of the human spirit, the
physical body and the energy body. Then there's a very brief summary of the
first four levels of reality from the kahuna perspective, three of which
are non-dual, I might add. The middle of the book has to do with the
principles and practices of spirit medicine. And the last third of the book
has to do with exercises that can be undertaken for your own self-healing.
Indigenous people make a very clear distinction between physical
medicine and spirit medicine. They view them as complementary to each other
and they don't choose one over the other. If you come into camp with an
arrow sticking out of your butt that's not the time to grab the drum and go
into trance. That's the time for physical medicine and all medicine people
and shamans know a great deal about physical medicine. But the goals of
spirit medicine and physical medicine are quite different from each other.
The primary purpose of the practice of physical medicine is the avoidance
of death and the prolongation of life. The primary purpose of the practice
of spirit medicine is to nurture and preserve the soul. When your soul's in
good shape, you're in good shape. When your soul's in shreds, there is a
problem-a big problem.
Shamans also pay a great deal of attention
to the relationship between cause and effect. As we move through life,
things happen. We get flues and viruses and colds; mumps, measles and
chicken pox as kids; bike injuries, sports injuries; we cut ourselves with
knives; and firecrackers go off. Accidents happen. This continues as we
pass through life. We get in car wrecks or we get fired from jobs. We
suffer traumas, slings and arrows; and divorces. Eventually, we pass
through old age and the progressive infirmity of and eventual death of the
physical body. Now, these are the givens. But from the shaman's
perspective, they're all effects. Every example I just gave is an effect.
And for true healing to occur, you have to address the cause.
Now
in the shaman's world, there are three classic causes of illness. The first
of these is disharmony. Disharmony is the state that we go into when we
have suffered a catastrophic loss. For example, consider a couple who've
been married together for 40 or 50 years, and God knows, grandma and
grandpa haven't had a perfect relationship. In fact, sometimes we even
wonder how they ever stayed together. But deep down, there's this
incredible bond between them because of everything that they have endured,
everything they've been through. Then one night suddenly one of them passes
over. Often, within six months to a year, the surviving spouse comes down
with something serious, and they're gone.
Over the years that my
wife and I have been doing this work together-I'm sometimes fond of saying
that I am now in the twenty-third year of my apprenticeship in this
interesting profession-virtually every case of cancer that we've treated
was caused by disharmony. It was somebody losing their grasp on who they
are in the world, like losing their label. It could be losing their
livelihood or their profession. This generates disharmony within the soul,
which translates into disharmony within the body, which produces cancer.
The second major cause of illness is fear. Fear is not good for
you. Fear diminishes your sense of well-being or your sense of being safe
in the world. That sense of well-being is the foundation for your personal
health system and when your sense of well-being goes down, it diminishes
the ability of your immune system to function. And when your immune system
goes down, you're in trouble. Now, you don't have to be a rocket scientist
to understand that fear and disharmony are like drinking buddies. Fear
creates disharmony and disharmony creates fear; and those problems can
manifest themselves as illnesses which are recognizable to Western science.
But it's the third classic cause of illness which is the most
serious one. The third classic cause of illness in the indigenous world is
what is known as "soul loss". This is regarded as the primary cause of
premature death and serious illness. And curiously, it's not even mentioned
in our Western medical textbooks. What do you think your primary care
physician, your PCP, would say if you went up to him or her and said, "You
know, I've had a terrible soul loss experience." What do you think that
person would say? If you got a good one, they'd say, "Gee, could you tell
me a little more about that?" Soul loss implies damage to your personal
supernature, your essence or your soul cluster. This damage usually occurs
in response to trauma. For example, like when a kid comes into the world
and discovers they're not wanted. Or when a girl emerges from her mother's
body and everybody was expecting a boy, and the whole family turns away.
Trauma occurs when a child is sent to school and is mercilessly teased and
bullied by their peer group day after day, year after year or when a child
is molested by the one who's supposed to be caring for them. Trauma occurs
when a person is raped or assaulted or abused. Very often, what happens
during those moments, the shock and horror and the pain of what's happening
to that person is so great that the entire soul cluster will dissociate.
And when the act is finished, part of the soul cluster will leave, and it
may not return. Soul loss happens in response to a terrible car accident. I
can't tell you how many people have come up to me over the years that we've
been doing this and say, "You know, I was in a terrible car accident five
years ago, and I've just never been the same. It's like part of me is
missing. I'd sure like to get it back." I'll ask them a question. I'll say,
"Well, tell me about the car wreck." They get this funny look on their
face, and they say, "Well, they had to cut me out of the car with the
'jaws-of-life'. You know, my legs were broken, my pelvis was broken, my
arms were broken." I'll cut in and say, "That must have been terribly
painful." They get this funny look on their face and say, "You know, I
don't remember the pain." Dead giveaway. Blocked memory is a classic
symptom of soul loss. It is when you cannot remember something that
happened or when you cannot remember whole parts of your life. You run into
people who say, "I can't remember anything from my childhood, or anything
between the ages of 7 and 11." That's a dead giveaway that something
terrible happened to that young person. A part of their soul dissociated
and left, taking that memory, that pain, that horror with it. It's actually
a life-coping mechanism, especially in children, because a lot of children
cannot withstand the horror and the trauma of what's happened to them.
Dissociation is actually a way of neutralizing the pain. Post-traumatic
stress syndrome is soul loss. That's what it is. All those young men and
women we sent over to Vietnam, Korea, Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, they
come home as the walking wounded, as the traumatized, the damaged, or the
deranged. That's soul loss. And unfortunately, our major medical systems
really don't know what to do with them because they haven't been trained in
how to deal with this. Now, soul loss is very easy to recognize if you know
what you're looking for. Blocked memory is a classic symptom. Other
symptoms are a sudden onset of apathy or listlessness or a lack of joy.
When you have somebody who has no joy only chronic negativity such as the
proverbial mother-in-law. Emotional remoteness is another symptom. If
you're in a relationship with somebody who's emotionally remote, there's a
very good likelihood that person has soul loss. That person cannot receive
the love that you have for them, and they cannot feel love for anyone else.
Other symptoms are suicidal tendencies, addictions or despair. And of
course, this brings up the classic symptom of soul loss-depression. Now, 10
years ago, there was a cover story in Time magazine on depression in
America. It was called "Prozac-Breakfast of Champions." That is glib
magazine writers coming up with something cute, but it was a very serious
problem. At that time, in America, in the early '90s, 30 million Americans
were taking antidepressant drugs on a daily basis to control their moods.
About five years ago, I had one of John Mack's psychiatric residents at one
of my workshops at the Esalen Institute and she told me, now it's more like
40 million Americans taking antidepressant drugs on a daily basis. That's a
huge percentage and soul loss on a national scale. And of course, when 9/11
happened, I remembered looking at the ticker tape going across the bottom
of my TV screen. It said 7 out of 10 Americans are experiencing depression
in response to 9/11. That's soul loss.
What is it like? Let's say you're living in the tropics and you've got a screen on your window and
there are holes in your screen. What are you going to get in your room?
Mosquitoes. If you've got tears in the fabric of your soul or if you've got
holes in your soul, those holes are open invitations for intrusions to come
in and take up residence. What kind of intrusions? Negative intrusions,
like viruses and bacteria and microbes or perverse thought forms. Let's say
you work in an office and you've got a hostile coworker who just can't
stand you, and they're always leveling negative thoughts at you. Now for
most of us, if our soul is in good shape, they just bounce off or pass
through and we're not affected. But when you've got holes in the fabric of
your soul, these negative intentions are like curses directed at you with
the intent to harm you, and they can be internalized and take up residence.
For example, it can come from neighbors who hate your guts, in-laws who
never find you worthy, or a jealous sibling who's always doing the dirty to
you. This can progressively affect you in a negative way. I had lunch once
with Carolyn Myss and she talked about these intrusions as energy circuits
circulating in your energetic matrix and drawing steadily from your
available supply of power. They're progressively diminishing you 24 hours a
day. And of course, if you start focusing on that negative memory or that
terrible trauma, where you bring it up one more time to talk about it at a
party to get everybody's attention, it's you feeding them. Because energy
flows where your attention goes, if you start focusing on your intrusions,
you're feeding them and they're getting stronger. Eventually, one day your
soul cluster takes a major hit and you've tipped the scale and you go from
"ease" into "dis-ease" or from health into illness. This is how shamans
view illness. It's a kind of threshold effect. When you've accumulated
enough negativity in yourself, something tips the scale and you've got
something bad.
Now, healing for the shaman takes place in four stages. All of this is laid out for you very nicely in my book Spirit
Medicine in a very concise way. The very first stage of healing for the
shaman is to empower you, to crank up your personal power supply, because
healing cannot take place if you're in a diminished state. This is very
easy to do if you know what you're doing and it is something I tell you how
to do with this little book along with the CD that is included. The second
level of healing involves diagnosing the problem. When we use the word
"shaman" in the West, many of us tend to conjure up an image of a masked
and costumed tribal person involved in some mysterious ritual dancing
around a fire in the dark with drum beats in the background. The mask, the
costume and ritual is "cultural" stuff and it varies from culture to
culture. But inside that cultural show, there is a man or a woman who has
very real skills. All true shamans are able to achieve deep states of
trance in which they can dissociate part of their soul, and journey into an
alternative reality where they encounter entities, beings, or spirits.
These are the spirits of nature, ancestral spirits, helping spirits, higher
spirits, the angelic forces, the teachers, or the guides. These are the
kind of spirits that shamans work with and through relationship with these
spirits, they can do various things. Initially, they work on behalf of
themselves and then increasingly on behalf of others.
In doing diagnosis work, a shaman when working with a client will go into the other
world, connect with their spirits and say, "Now listen, I need your help. I
need information on anything you can tell me about Angela's problem." And
very often, shamans will be shown things, mythically, metaphorically, or
symbolically, which have to do with this person's story. Now, you can do
this through psychic awareness, for those of us who have it. But those of
us who don't have it, by connecting with spirits, you get it. They feed the
information to you. I'm talking about the compassionate forces who are
poised just on the other side of the mirror, who are there for us, and who
want to help us alleviate pain and suffering. There's a whole contingency
of them just waiting for people to make contact with them. Unfortunately,
we live in a society in which this is regarded as paranormal. From the
shaman's perspective, it's normal because they live in that world. The
shaman and the spirits work together. Sometimes they will actually journey
into the person's body, with their permission, of course. If somebody's
been assaulted, abused, raped, they may have serious boundary issues. And
so, there's a certain degree of trust that has to be established before you
can do spiritual healing with somebody. When that trust is established and
the agreement is made, you cruise into that person's system. I've had some
really extraordinary experiences where, for example, I'll be cruising
through somebody's vena cava, and I'll take a detour through the liver and
I'll see all these maggots in the person's liver. Or I'll be down in the GI
tract and I'll see that the GI tract is packed with scorpions. I remember
working with a young 21 year old woman of 21 who had endometriosis. When I
was doing the diagnosis work with my spirits in attendance, I saw this
woman's uterus with a big spider clamped around it, and the lining of her
uterus was being squeezed out through the cervix into her body cavity. This
is what endometriosis is. Now that doesn't mean she really had a spider
clamped around her uterus. That's just the way I was seeing the intrusion.
I'm seeing it in a mythic and metaphorical sense. And I'm seeing it as
something that repels me.
Once the shaman has seen the intrusions, the game is up. Because when you're working with your spirits, you go to
work as a team and you just remove those intrusions from the person's field
or body. This is called "extraction," Shamanic extraction work. This is
very easy to do with a minimum of training. In our "Visionseeker II"
workshop, my wife and I teach people how to do this. But once the intrusion
has been extracted, the last stage of healing involves repairing the soul.
Because from the shaman's perspective, the primary problem is not the
cancer or the disease, but the damage to the person's soul, or the loss of
that person's power, that allowed the illness intrusions to get in and
manifest themselves. That is the problem and this is where shamans and
spirit medicine do their best work.
The final level of healing involves this mysterious practice known as "soul retrieval" or "restoring
the person's soul". The shaman, working in tandem with their spirits, finds
these lost soul parts. Now this is very interesting because in psychology
and psychiatry, we know about dissociation. But where do those dissociated
parts go? Most psychiatrists and psychologists don't know. The shaman
knows. And usually, you find those dissociated soul parts back in the
spirit world searching for that which they need. For example, a child's
soul part may be found in the great dream worlds of nature, which are
sometimes called the "lower worlds." You may find that soul, that child's
soul, being companioned by a power animal, like a bear. Those teddy bears
we give our children are more than just toys. They are symbols for a power,
an animal power that you're inviting to come into relationship with your
child. You may not know it consciously, but subconsciously, that's exactly
what's happening. You may find that child being taken care of by a great
big mama grizzly bear. So in approaching that child's soul, you may
actually have to bring the bear back as well, because the child won't leave
without the bear. What the shaman does is bring these dissociated aspects
of the self back to restore the soul of the individual. That is the final
stage of healing.
On the Pacific Northwest Coast up north of where I live in Northern California, people who do that kind of soul retrieval
work are often called "soul catchers." Soul catchers are regarded as being
in a league of their own as shamanic healers. Not all shamans are good at
it but when you meet somebody who can really do this, they're like national
treasures. I've discovered that my wife, Jill Kuykendall, is fabulous at
it. She's a soul catcher. She used to work in acute care rehab in
hospitals. She now has an office in Roseville, just north of Sacramento,
and a full-time private practice involved with soul retrieval. For those
people who can't come to her, she does soul retrieval long distance,
because this is non-local work. You don't have to have the person in the
room with you while you're doing it.
Let me tell you one of her stories to give you an idea of how she works. This was a long-distance soul
retrieval for a man in Minnesota. There is a woman who Jill knows very well
who was getting married to a man in his sixties, and this man had been
damaged earlier in life by a really sad incident. He'd never really
recovered from it. This man was really scarred emotionally. When his wife-
to-be told him about my wife, he contacted her and asked if she could be
the one who would help him restore his soul. In the process, he told her a
really sad story. When he was in the third grade, he was going to Catholic
school. For those of you who've been to Catholic school, the very first
thing that happens when school opens up again in September is that the
third grade gets to sit in the front of the chapel and the entire third
grade gets to have communion before the rest of the school. It's kind of
like initiation. This little boy had been looking forward to this with all
of his heart. He was just "maxed" by this idea that he was going to be
given communion before anybody else at the school with his class. He was
advised by the Sisters he couldn't eat or drink anything before the
ceremony. On the day that it was to happen, he was so excited, instead of
riding the school bus to school, he skipped and ran all the way to the
school, which was only about six or eight blocks. But when he got there, he
was thirsty, and without thinking, went to have a drink at the drinking
fountain and he's in the process of having a drink when somebody grabs him
by the scruff of the neck and pulls him up. It's one of the nuns and she
says, "No communion for you." That little boy was forced to go into the
church and sit alone in front of the whole school while his entire class
got up and was served communion. He sat there alone and he had never
recovered from this. Then my wife did divination work for him long
distance. He is in Minnesota and she is in Roseville. She always does a
whole series of things beforehand. She goes into trance. She hooks up with
her spirit helpers. She has a very unique way of doing this work, which I
have never encountered in anyone before. Suddenly, the church appears in
the visionary state. She goes into the back of the church with her spirits
in attendance. The church seems completely empty. But way down, right in
front, there's this little head all by itself. They come down the main
aisle of the church and there's this little boy sitting in the pew. His
soul part is still there in that church where he was denied communion some
50 years before. He's still there. He's frozen and it looks like he's made
of ice. Jill is looking at this little boy with her spirits around her and
she's wondering what to do. She puts out the call for any other spirits who
would like to come and help to restore this little boy's soul. The minute
she does this, a door opens in the back of the church on the side. Not in
the back, not in the front, but on the side. A door opens and in walks this
luminous being. That luminous being comes down the side and comes across
the front of the church. My wife understood in that moment that this
luminous being was none other than the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. The
spirit of Jesus of Nazareth comes across and stands in front of this little
boy and looks at him with this incredible compassion and love flowing out
of his eyes. Then he leans down and he blows into this little boy's face
with his breath, and as he does, the little boy's face starts to warm. He
blows again and he warms some more. And over the next five minutes, the
spirit of Jesus of Nazareth used his breath to unfreeze this little boy.
And as the little boy comes to life, he is looking confused at my wife and
all of her animal spirits and this beautiful radiant luminous being in
front of him. Suddenly the spirit of Jesus turns and goes up to the front
of the church. While my wife and her spirits look on, Jesus turns with a
tray and he comes down and served this little boy communion. It's an
incredible story. And I can just barely tell it without breaking into
tears, it was so moving. Through this experience, my wife was able to take
this little boy's revived soul and restore it to the man who had lost it so
many years before. This man's life changes and he comes to life
emotionally. He gets married to a wonderful woman and he lives the rest of
his life in a joyful way. His soul was healed. This is soul retrieval at
its absolute best.
The core of the work that my wife and I do
involves finding, first of all, your inner place of wisdom and power in the
other worlds. This is all summarized very nicely in my little book called
Journey to the Sacred Garden, which also has a CD with Shamanic rattle and
drumming. It contains two half-hour tracks for "journey work" at home. The
"sacred garden" is a place that lives inside of us, inside of our soul.
Usually, the place that we have as a sacred garden is a place that we've
known in life. Someplace we've visited, which moved us very deeply, like
visiting Yosemite or going to the beach in La Jolla. It could be a
beautiful island in the Pacific or a place in the Alps that you've never
forgotten. It could be your own backyard. It could be Central Park in New
York. It's usually a place where we feel a very strong connection with
nature and where we feel restored, powerful, and together. It is a place
where we just feel wonderful. When you bring up the memory of this place,
which you may do from time to time, it is like you're daydreaming. You are
going back into this place and experiencing what it was like to be there.
And so, I'm going to suggest that we do a very short
"experiential" using the drum. My suggestion in the brief drumming journey
that we're going to do is that you choose such a place that you've been to
in life. It could also be a place that you've created, such as Peter Pan's
"Neverland". Peter Pan's "Neverland" was his sacred garden with lions and
tigers and bears and pirates and Indians and the "Island of the Lost Boys"
and "Captain Hook" and the crocodile and all. That's his sacred garden.
This is an inner place where we can go to restore, empower, and heal
ourselves. What I'm going to do is drum for you, and I want you to find
this place, your personal place, which you can use as a sacred garden. When
you do, I want you to be aware of the fact that this garden operates by
four rules. Rule number one: Everything in your garden is symbolic. This is
the level of archetypes that Carl Jung was so interested in. And archetypes
are symbols. The trees in your garden might be symbolic of your own inner
strength. The pond in your garden might be symbolic of the waters of peace
and reconciliation. The fire pit in your garden with the ever-burning fire
might be symbolic of the gateway to the ancestors. The rainbows in your
garden might be bridges into the upper worlds. This is what I mean by
symbolic. Number two: You can communicate with everything that makes your
garden up. You can talk to the birds, to the trees, or to the water. And
they'll communicate back to you, but you have to learn how to listen
because there's no guarantee that a tree is going to speak the King's
English. It may happen intuitively, emotively. Number three: You can change
your garden. Let's say you don't have a pond in the place that you've
chosen to be your garden. Create one with your dreaming, your creative
imagination. I didn't have a waterfall in the place I chose to be my garden
so I created one. And I love to sit beside my waterfall. In fact, there's a
room behind the waterfall, a kind of a cave that goes down into the lower
world. That's one of the ways I get there. But when you change your garden,
when you add something to your garden or delete something from your garden,
some aspect of your life is going to shift in response. That is Rule number
four: Some aspect of you or your life is going to shift in response. That's
true magic.
Now, as we do this quick drumming journey, I want you to find your place.
I'm going to play the drum at a theta brain wave pattern, which is roughly
four to five beats per second. And at the end of 10 minutes or so, I'll
call you back by slowing down the drum, and then I'll drum the "call-back"
four times. And then I'll drum very rapidly for a minute or two. And then,
once again I'll drum four times. This gets your brain waves back into alpha
waves and eventually into beta, which are thinking patterns. It will bring
you back out of the trance.
Now,
just to make this interesting, when you get to your garden, have a look
around. You may feel your garden, you may see your garden. It might be a
beautiful tone of music for those of us who are very auditory in the way we
access. You know, it might be a garden in the clouds or one underwater. To
make this interesting, once you get to your garden, I want you to put out
the call for an ancestor who loves you to come and meet with you in your
garden. It could be very well that revered grandmother or grandfather or
aunt or uncle who's already crossed over. But it might be somebody from
further back who you don't know. So you might ask them if you don't
recognize them, "Who are you? How are we in relationship?" And you may
discover that you've had an ancestor who has been working behind the scenes
serving you as a guide, as a protector, as an advisor, as a teacher. It's a
way of really bringing this person back into your life. And the garden is a
perfect place to meet with them because the garden is the same level that
we go into when we make transition, and they may still be there in that
level, because this place is outside of time. So let's do this. Let's take
a few clearing breaths to relax.
[The lights are dimmed and Hank Wesselman begins to drum. After about 10
minutes, he signals to come back out. Hank Wesselman again addresses the
audience]
HANK WESSELMAN:
In response to this very brief drumming journey, how many of you feel that
you were successful at finding an inner place, an inner place of
connection, a place that you remember, like a sacred garden? Probably about
half. Did anyone have an indigenous ancestor come to them who is not sure
that they had indigenous ancestors in their mother or father's lineage? The
reason I ask this is because we have three ancestral lineages. There is the
mother, father, and your personal "oversoul". Your "oversoul" is the
repository for all of your past lives. It's the source that we come in from
when we come into life, and it's the source to which we return when we're
done with this cycle. And so, all of your past selves and past lifetimes
are encoded into this "oversoul" field. Some of this is in my book
Spirit Medicine. There's so much we could talk about but I'm out of
time and need to close my presentation. I'd like to thank the Bodhi Tree
who invited me to be here tonight and thank all you for coming.
If you are interested in additional information about Hank Wesselman and
Jill Kuykendall , you may access their web site www.sharewisdomcom. They do
presentations, healing sessions, and workshops through out the year.
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