Four drummers gently drummed the heartbeat and so held and built the space. At first they stood close to two women who knelt on the pavement, drawing cloven hoofed animals with their chalks while a third enclosed the drawings with a quotation from Chief Seathl. As people started to gather, the drummers moved out, enlarging the sacred space. As the sun set we started. We told of the plight of the animals and of the importance of grief. Grief is like the salt of life - it gives it vibrancy and meaning and by contrast serves to heighten our joy. As people lit candles, they spoke their own prayers or told their own experiences. Tears were added to a flower-filled chalice of spring water, which was later emptied into the river so that the river could take our tears to the sea and the sea could carry them around the globe and all the earth should know of our grief. We read an amended extract from one of Lorka's poems. We sang Geronimo's chant, a lament, and then we prayed for inspiration. As the prayer finished, the great West doors of Bath Abbey opened and light flooded out onto our group. A crowd of people poured out and swelled our ranks. For a short while, Christians and their traditional enemies - the earth spirituality peoples - joined together. So the ceremony closed and as we left, we looked back at a simple circle of candles illuminating the drawing and the words: our testament to our relations that we remembered them and we mourned their passing.

Do we use ceremony enough in times of social and political difficulty?

When we see the government implementing a policy that we strongly disagree with, most people resort to some form of political action. If we are not used to operating in that arena we often feel clumsy and ignorant and ill equipped. So for many of us the thought never gets translated into action. If it does it may feel unsatisfying and lame.

So it was with Foot and Mouth. I instinctively felt that it was wrong for the government to be slaughtering millions of healthy animals especially as the disease is rarely fatal for animals and doesn't hurt humans. This crisis threw into relief the way that we fail to honour the animals we raise; we fail to express gratitude for the sacrifice of their lives - well, we all know how it goes.

Something had to be done. What could it be? I wrote a few letters to MPs but the tension inside me continued to grow. As often happens, Spirit dropped a small seed into my head. It was up to me whether I nurtured that seed or let it float by like thistledown.

The idea was simple. Good Friday is the day when our established Church celebrates and honours Christ's sacrifice. Well, let us take this day to honour these millions of animals whose lives are being sacrificed to our greed. The response of the first people I told was so positive that I embarked upon the venture almost in spite of myself.

The choice of place was easy. The Abbey courtyard is in the centre of Bath and is a beautiful open space which many people use and is free of traffic. More important, it is flanked on one side by the Abbey and on the other by the building that houses the Hot Springs, a powerful gateway to the otherworld.

I was taken aback by people's reactions - the papershop man, the garageman, everybody in my part of town - by the overwhelming gratitude. Thank you: that needed to be done. Thank you: we are feeling overwhelmed. Thank you: what is going on is so bad and we're glad that someone has stood up and said so. The farmers who came had a space to weep and for their tears to be witnessed and honoured.

So how did the ceremony unfold? At first there was an idea, then there were the practicalities of getting people together. As this happened so the form of the ceremony started to emerge. Looking back on it, I guess these are the suggestions I would make to others.

You probably won't have a clear idea of the form at the beginning. That will emerge as you begin to talk about it and will continue during the preparations. The day after I announced my intention to two friends, I journeyed with the drum and received a teaching that translated into a development of the form. As I described the forthcoming ceremony to people I found the form developing of its own accord and input arriving from all over the place. The Lorca poem was offered to us on Good Friday by someone who was not planning to come. More details were decided as a few of us, including the drummers, went through a smudge ceremony minutes before making our way down to the Abbey courtyard. So the intent must be clear, the form should be held gently and then it will begin to grow, with input from many directions.

You need to be vigilant and remember your intent throughout the preparation period. For example, what was the right energy to nurture this project? I was asked whether I was advertising this with posters, on the Web, on local radio? I realised none of those ways would be in keeping with the energy of ceremony. I wanted an invitation to be passed around quietly by word of mouth. Who would come would come. We weren't going to be standing on the street handing out leaflets to passers-by. In fact the passers-by didn't matter. What mattered was that we would be able to create the space, hold the energy, and send out our prayers and trust that that was enough. Our airwaves were not radio and television but something subtler - perhaps the pigeons and starlings that cluster around the Abbey courtyard would hear us. The odd mouse or rat. Maybe a fox would venture that far into the city and see our drawing and pause by the light of our candles.

When setting up a public ceremony you need a group of experienced friends to hold the space. You will be too busy yourself running around attending to details and orchestrating the affair. And the skills that your friends bring will help mould the final form of the ceremony. Everybody has a different gift in the same way that we all have a particular starting point on the Medicine Wheel. Some clearly start in the West, others feel more at home in the South and so on. When considering ceremony, what skills do you bring? Are you a maker with an aptitude for beading, sewing, weaving branches, making wreaths? Are you a collector, the one who knows where to find different stones, rare mineral pieces, the one who can persuade a shopkeeper to loan out a precious glass chalice for the evening? Is music your love? Can you hold and build energy with a drum? Do you sing and do chants come to you? Are you a dancer? Do you like working with people, combining their skills? Encouraging those who feel unsure of themselves? Are you the one to choreograph their energies?

Always remember that the preparation time always takes far longer than the Ceremony itself. By the time that you start on the form itself, much of the work has been done. You have been calling to Spirit and in fact Spirit has been responding during the preparation stage. Those who prepare for a Sundance generally take a minimum of a year to prepare for a four day ceremony. Then it is a powerful thing. Then we can trust that there is enough force behind our ritual actions - enough power, enough love, enough beauty - that even a small ceremony will send out its energy far and wide. That the fox and the birds, the elements and even the humans will feel it and will respond.

Some lines from Frederico Garcia Lorca's poem New York, translated by Robert Bly and paraphrased for the vigil on Good Friday

Beneath all the statistics
Beneath all the columns
There is a drop of blood.
Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood.
A river that goes singing
past the bedrooms of the suburbs,
and the river is silver, cement, or wind
in the lying daybreak of the city.

I have not come to see the sky.
I have come to see the stormy blood,
the blood that sweeps the machines on to the
waterfalls
Every day they kill in the city,
pigs, five million
cows, one million,
lambs, one million

The cows and the sheep
The hogs and the lambs
lay their drops of blood down
underneath all the statistics;
and the terrible bawling of the packed-in cattle
fills the valley with suffering.

This is not hell, it is a street
This is not death, it is a fruit stand.
There is a whole world of crushed rivers.
What shall I do to set my landscapes in order?

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Ceremony and the 21st century

Now is the time to know
That all you do is sacred - Hafiz

Making Ceremony is a way of reminding ourselves that in fact all that we do is sacred. It is also a way of intensifying an experience that we want to mark. Last year we in Britain struggled with the horror that was the Foot and Mouth epidemic. I felt very concerned and also powerless in face of it. I decided to do the one thing that I was good at: construct and enact a public ceremony of grieving for the animals being sacrificed. Good Friday seemed an auspicious day, so that was the day we chose and the ceremony came together something like this.

Four drummers gently drummed the heartbeat and so held and built the space. At first they stood close to two women who knelt on the pavement, drawing cloven hoofed animals with their chalks while a third enclosed the drawings with a quotation from Chief Seathl. As people started to gather, the drummers moved out, enlarging the sacred space. As the sun set we started. We told of the plight of the animals and of the importance of grief. Grief is like the salt of life - it gives it vibrancy and meaning and by contrast serves to heighten our joy. As people lit candles, they spoke their own prayers or told their own experiences. Tears were added to a flower-filled chalice of spring water, which was later emptied into the river so that the river could take our tears to the sea and the sea could carry them around the globe and all the earth should know of our grief. We read an amended extract from one of Lorka's poems. We sang Geronimo's chant, a lament, and then we prayed for inspiration. As the prayer finished, the great West doors of Bath Abbey opened and light flooded out onto our group. A crowd of people poured out and swelled our ranks. For a short while, Christians and their traditional enemies - the earth spirituality peoples - joined together. So the ceremony closed and as we left, we looked back at a simple circle of candles illuminating the drawing and the words: our testament to our relations that we remembered them and we mourned their passing.

What was perhaps most surprising was the reactions of people whom I hardly knew - tradespeople I met like the papershop man, the garageman, everybody in my part of town - expressed gratitude for what we had done. And the farmers who came had a space to weep and for their tears to be honoured.

It is always harder to judge what effect your ceremony has had on a deeper level. However, it is through our myths and stories that the future is built. Our memories shape our dreams for the future. So every time that we do a good ceremony, make a powerful drama expressing ritually and symbolically how things might be at their most beautiful, we fill our memory with that experience and that will affect our future actions. If we believe in the concept of collective consciousness, that as humans we tune into a pool of all human ideas, dreams and activity, then we understand that we are feeding dreams and experiences of beauty and harmony into the general pool for all to be touched by.

Making ceremony, we attempt to move out of ordinary time and space. The simplest way to do this was taught to me many years ago by Arnold Keyserling, then President of the European Association of Humanistic Psychology and, at the same time, apprenticed to Hyemeyohsts Storm. He suggested that we set aside a particular time of day perhaps for as little as ten minutes or so. The important thing was that it should always be the same time. During that period, we laid out a small cloth, something as insignificant as a handkerchief, and sat quietly with the same intention every day. In this very small way, we start to create ceremonial space for ourselves. A place and a time outside the normal run of our lives where we invite the unexpected and the other to enter.

But is ceremony really relevant in a world not of feathers, smudge or tipi but of Garnier, Nike and Renault Clio? Where the wildness of the ocean sells Guinness and the great Quetzal is transmuted into a road marking.

Most of us live in urban settings and have lost touch with much of our traditional mythology and ritual. In losing touch with these ancient circles of mystery, which were once the gateways to uncommon dimensions of reality, we have lost touch with the wilderness of our own souls.
Perhaps it is precisely because we are so barraged by advertising hype, political spin and journalistic licence that we need now more than ever the anchors that remind us of the realities of our lives. Getting lost in a delusional, fragmented post-modern world of virtual reality, we become addicted to adrenalin, throw ourselves out of balance and then are terrified to discover that one in three of us will contract cancer and need psychiatric help during our lifetimes.

Ceremony, and particularly the ceremonies that are rooted in an earth-based spiritual tradition, help us regain our balance, our sense of purpose, and a deep feeling of belonging in the natural world that brings with it a strong sense of joy.

Ceremony is the basis for all shamanic and spiritual work. It is through ceremony that we communicate with the Divine, with the Goddess, with Great Spirit. It is ceremony that creates the space for shamanic healing, for rites of passage, for us to quest our true purpose in life; and it offers a strong base on which to build community.

We can create our own ceremonies or we can learn from ancient traditions - such as those of the Native Americans - where ceremony and ritual have been honed over generations. As an Elder said to me once when about to start a sweatlodge -"I am just the water pourer. It is the ceremony itself that holds the mystery and the healing."

And that is the point. Ceremonies can be held at many levels and for many purposes. The most potent of these aim to open a connection with the divine source, with the creative energy behind all form. The hope is to ask for mediation, to attempt a change for the better that is begun on the inner subtle levels and whose effects are then experienced in the mundane. Thus in a Navajo healing, sand paintings will be made and chants will be sung to anchor the patient firmly back into a place of balance in a world that includes their relations, their landscape and the spirits that watch over all of these. If it is successful, this will imprint itself into the being of the patient who will be able to hold the experience of being well and held safe in his universe; and his symptoms will disappear.

Ceremony reminds us that the line between our everyday world and the divine is fine and easily crossed. Nowhere is this better taught than in the Native American Medicine Wheel teachings.
As Beautiful Painted Arrow says, behind all form is the light-filled void; behind every chant and drumbeat is the silence. But all of life is not dismissed as an illusion. Here is a tradition that brings spiritual teachings down from the sky and imbues every animate and inanimate object with life. Spirit dwell within the whole of creation. The mundane world is a manifestation of the divine.

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Medicine Wheel teachings

What are Medicine Wheel teachings? How do they relate to us? In what ways might we begin to work with them?

"This sacred body we inhabit is not only clay and bone:
it is star and stone."
Brooke Medicine Eagle

The term Medicine Wheels describes an ancient system developed in the Americas that encompasses spirituality, philosophy, ecology, social and personal development. The term Medicine refers to a state of being in harmony and balance with ourselves, the world and with spirit. Teachings are given out in Wheels or circles. This is a system that understands the cyclic nature of life and honours diversity and difference; one that values equality over hierarchy. While these teachings are rooted in spiritual values and practice, they are not religious, as we understand the term. Although they share core elements, they developed very differently among different peoples. The Native Americans seem to have developed a system that encouraged spiritual diversity and tolerance during the very period when we in Europe and the Middle East were honing our skills in religious persecution.

At their core is a constant reminder about the necessity for finding a lifestyle that allows us to live in harmony and balance with the rest of our world. Were Medicine people to talk about the ecology of the earth they would remind us that we are an integral part of that ecology. That the other inhabitants of this earth are all in some way related to us and therefore should be honoured and acknowledged to have an equal right to life. They would describe a life of moderation where we would take what we need with respect. They understood that death is an unavoidable part of life and that we are all struggling with one another for survival. As you ruthlessly take the life of another to provide sustenance for yourself and your family, you should also look death in the eye and acknowledge the sacrifice that you demand. Ruthlessness and compassion walk hand in hand in this tradition.

So what are these Medicine Wheels and could they have any relevance to our current complex society? Although they are ancient, we find that their message is not archaic, nor is the culture that they come from as simple as we have been led to believe. Until the mid-twentieth century, most Europeans held a distorted view of the lives of the inhabitants of the Americas. They destroyed the more recognisable agrarian cultures in Central and South America and on the east coast of the North American continent and depicted the nomadic hunters of the Great Plains as noble savages, glorifying what they saw as a people living in a primitive way on an untamed earth. The reality was quite different:

"…here was a way of life with immense technical and social sophistication. Far from being simple or primitive, the economic and cultural techniques of hunter-gatherers were hard to see and difficult to assess precisely because they were meeting needs of mobility, decision making and resource harvesting that were both varied and subtle. Here was a triumph of human achievement, a triumph that spoke to how most of the world had lived for most of human history."
From the other side of eden by Hugh Brodie

With our Judaeo-Christian roots, we in Europe live by a monotheistic dualistic belief system. We believe in scientific reality and certainty and look for generalised rules that we can learn and apply to many different situations. The culture that Medicine Wheel teachings have emerged from saw things very differently. To quote from Hugh Brodie again:

"The knowledge that marks hunter-gatherers' relationship to their territories is an intricate mixture of the real and the supernatural. There are facts about things and facts about spirits. And the wall between these two kinds of entity is not solid. People can cross from the natural into the supernatural; spirits can move into the human domain. Just as this divide between physical and metaphysical is permeable, so also is the divide between humans and animals. In this way, the boundaries around the human world are porous. …

Here are metaphors and magic, and a world where there are no material certainties. In these conditions, respect for the world is as important as knowledge itself. …There is no limit to what the world may contain, or to how the unknown may reveal itself. Everyone must pay close attention, be careful, use every faculty to be aware of the land and all that it may hold."

Understanding how many unknowns may affect every situation, there is less generalisation and more specific understanding. The Medicine Wheels teach us to look at a given situation in its own right. The Four Directions Wheel teaches us to put it into context, the Twenty Count broadens the context so that we can explore possible far-reaching effects of a course of action; the Star Maiden's Circle illuminates prejudices, closed symbols and other possible mental blocks to creativity. The Council Wheel is a marvellous tool for resolving conflict, for ensuring that everyone gets heard, for defusing anger, for allowing a balanced picture to emerge, for making space for the unusual inspirational moment.

However, it would be difficult to work with the subtlety of any of these Wheels without being familiar with the basic premises. These teachings are primarily for the individual, to enable us to understand how we belong in this sometimes mad, bad and crazy world. To remind us of our humanity and holiness and beauty when things are rough and we are lost or tired or angry or feel betrayed.

David Wagner's poem, Lost, which derives its inspiration from a Native American teaching story, may illustrate my point:

Stand still

The trees ahead and bushes beside you
are not lost

Wherever you are is called Here
and you must treat it
as a powerful stranger
must ask permission to know it
and be known

Listen

The forest breathes
It whispers 'I have made this place
around you'
'if you leave it you may come back again
saying Here'

No two trees are the same to raven
No two branches are the same to wren
If what a tree or a branch does
is lost on you then you are surely lost

Stand still

The forest knows where you are
You must let it find you

David Wagner; Lost (from a Native American teaching story)

Medicine Wheel teachings start from the present moment and their first task is orientation. They take the four points of the compass which they call the Four Directions and orient us with qualities that relate to the world as we perceive it. For example, the sun rises in the east so the east is the place to remember the sun and all the qualities it holds. Symbolism mixes with material reality. Thus we also learn that the Sun is our Father/Grandfather, the spark of our origins; that the East is the place of spirit which we might experience as disembodied light. It is also true to say that the sun is our source of life in material reality and it is from the sun that the earth came, that we came. The sun is part of the developing universe and itself was manifested out of cosmic dust and gases. So while each teaching may sound esoteric and spiritual, it is also based on what we would call scientific fact. And each teaching is synthetic: the more we learn, the more we discover there is to learn. This Wheel continues around the directions, west, south and north, reminding us of the building blocks of our world as we go.

Another difference between this system and our western approach is that there is no division between intellectual disciplines. So while rationally we can learn about the development of our world, we never lose the poetry that runs through our creation. Nor are we allowed to forget that the other members of the natural world are living, breathing beings like ourselves. This is constantly reinforced by the term all our relations. This reminds us that we all grew and developed out of the same substance - plants, animals and humans. When studying the Medicine Wheel teachings we cannot reduce all of creation to an abstract and mechanical equation. They are specific and synthetic and direct the mind to focus onto the particular and spin out into abstractions too heady, too fabulous to describe in any but the most poetic terms.

You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting
You only
you only
you only
have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair
Yours
And I will tell you mine
but meanwhile the world goes on
Meanwhile the sun and the soft pebbles of rain
are moving across the landscapes
over the prairies and the deep trees
the mountains and the rivers
Meanwhile the wild geese
high in the clear blue air are heading home again.

Whoever you are
No matter how lonely
The world offers itself to your imagination
It calls to you like wild geese
Harsh and exciting
Over and over again
Announcing your place
in the family of things. The Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

There is a Native American teaching story about a sick child, who coughs and coughs. Her parents send for the Medicine Woman who comes and makes her diagnosis. She says there is a hungry fox out in the snow, the father must go after it, catch it and bring it back unhurt to the home. He does this, spending three or four days out in the snow. The little girl's cough and the fox's claws rattling on the ice mirror one another. Finally the father brings the fox home. The little girl is delighted with the small soft creature. The mother feeds the starving and exhausted animal. After two days eating and sleeping the little fox is strong enough to leave and the little girl is better.

What can we make of this story? The fox symbolises family life. Perhaps their family life was out of balance and this made the little girl so sad that her lungs - the place of sadness - got infected, filled up with the phlegm of her unexpressed grief, so she fell ill. The old woman suggested a task that allowed all members of the family to act appropriately for their role in the family. The father had to work the hardest to restore the balance. Once balance was restored, the girl could recover and the fox and the old woman could go. Who cured whom? The fox was starving and close to death and it also recovered. So we are also reminded that the effects of our actions stretch far farther than we realise.

The tale would be told in an engaging and humorous way so that everyone opened to its message spontaneously both intellectually and emotionally. What you take in emotionally often stays longer and fixes deeper than what is just understood in an abstract way. A story that seems simple on the surface has much hidden material

So, Medicine Wheel teachings are subtle and complex. They speak to the whole being and encourage us through story, humour, song, and movement, to use our imaginations to understand our place in the vastness of creation. Although that place is tiny, we do not feel isolated or dwarfed because we are constantly being referred back to the familiar and the small.

How do these teachings about our relationship to plants and trees, these tales of wild animals and hunters and village people relate to us urbanites in our sophisticated, complex modern world? A world not of feathers or smudge or tipi but of Garnier, Nike and Renault Clio. Where the wildness of the ocean sells Guinness and the great Quetzal is transmuted into a road marking.

Perhaps it is precisely because we are so barraged by the unrealities of life that we need now more than ever the anchors that remind us of the realities of our lives. Getting lost in a delusional, fragmented post-modern world of virtual reality, we become addicted to adrenaline, throw ourselves out of balance and then are terrified to discover that one in three of us will contract cancer and need psychiatric help during our lifetimes.

Medicine Wheel teachings are a simple and playful route into an understanding of the deeper and often scary questions that only plague some of us during a sleepless night. They contain the lifelines that enable us to withstand failure, bereavement, betrayal and boredom with equanimity and stamina. With their poetic imagery and wild stories they remind us to open our imaginations. They develop a compassion within us that affects our actions. They remind us of a longing, a desire for whatever it is that lies behind the beauty of a sunset, that lies beyond stars watched on a warm summer night, that creates the bubbles that pop and glisten on a cup of hot chocolate.

How do they relate to our own European culture? They provide a framework on which to hang the fragments of our own archaic earth based teachings, they help us reconnect with our origins and awaken remembrance of what meanings our own deep and many layered symbols might hold for us. There are many White Hart pubs scattered around Britain. How many of us remember that the white hart was a sacred animal that drew humans deep into the forest for a meeting with the goddess? Recently people who would have described themselves as rational republicans have been surprised to find that some feeling was stirred in them by the funeral of the Queen Mother. In days gone by, the monarch was married to the sovereign, the land herself. He swore fealty - loyalty and obedience - to her. The traditional ritual of the coronation still carries echoes of that ceremony that resonate within our genetic memories. The green man - is he a human with leaves coming out of his mouth as the Victorian carvings suggest rather grotesquely. Or is he perhaps a living plant describing that it has a spirit as developed and as communicative as our own?

At one time, we too knew that we were intimately connected to the earth and all living beings. Remembrance of this helps us distinguish between the real and the delusional. More, it reminds us of a time when myth and history were indistinguishable, when stories and metaphors took us back to the truths of our lives. I first discovered how this worked when reading about the Mound Dwellers who at a certain period spread along the Mississippi. Their history was described in stories about individuals - thus a chief's son would go to a neighbouring tribe and steal away their chief's daughter, causing endless trouble. A whole story was woven around this incident which was both amusing and held ethical teachings; animals might help or hinder, spirits might appear in dreams. At the same time, the story itself held the history of territorial struggles between the two groups. Thus spiritual and ethical teachings, history and entertainment were interwoven. People were used to digesting complex information. More important, they were constantly being reminded of the realities of their existence.

Medicine Wheel teachings have been around for thousands of years. Having stood the test of time on the huge continent we know as the Americas, they are now filtering into our western culture. Clearly they enabled generations of humans to live fulfilled and happy lives. The ways in which they can help us out of our current global difficulties are endless. They can help us regain our mythologies; enable the individual to set her/his life into balance; give us a framework for understanding ways out of our ecological crises that are grounded and not over idealistic. They do not attempt to overturn our culture, rather they offer to help it regain a sense of order and balance.

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