Rattling the Bones

What do you know about gravity? Two decades ago when I started learning about the Medicine Wheel, the first thing that I noticed was how important gravity was to the Wheel. For starters, Medicine Wheels are built with stones where the space between the stones is precisely and strategically calculated. Both Isaac Newton’s and Albert Einstein’s theories are represented within Sacred Circle tradition. Isaac Newton for example explained gravity as “a force or a kind of magnetism.” With the help of an apple, he came up with three basic laws of motion. Albert Einstein on the other hand saw gravity as “the result of a curve between space and time.” Both their theories are crucial to today’s scientific exploration. The Medicine Wheel shows us that our First Nation ancestors were as interested in natural laws as Newton, Einstein, and other great physicists and philosophers. They connected gravity to the stars, the sun and the moon as well as the daily story of life on earth. We all kno...

We rarely speak about the elements on the Medicine Wheel and when we do discuss them, we usually move quickly through them as if they are steps within a process rather than actual whole experiences. For example I’ve been spending lots of time with our new Beagle puppy. She’s been with us for a little over three weeks. During this time I’ve observed how important trust is to dogs even more so than it is to humans. When CT played his drums last weekend, Bella ran back and forth from the living room to my desk where I was working. She was nervous and scared. She didn’t trust the noise. When we started teaching her to walk and sit, we noticed that she sat sideways rather than confidently forward. After a while we realized it was because she wasn’t completely comfortable with what she was doing. In the car, in the dark, in the back yard and while roaming the neighbourhood all of her behaviours translated to trust. Did she trust the dogs in the neighbour’s yard; did she trust the l...

We often talk about dreaming as a kind of collection of symbols; which are conveying a message. Often enough we expect our dreams to transmit this message in a clear and direct manner as if dreams are independent from us. What boggles my mind is how could a dream possess an ability that we as individuals haven’t developed or disciplined? Most of my career has been spent watching people attempt to convey a message and completely miss their mark. And that’s when my clients actually consciously work on their intention and plan their discourse in advance. I guess what I’m trying to say (and the pun was intentional) or point out is that it is difficult to communicate our thoughts, our feelings and our intentions with the help of 150 words or less, not because there aren’t enough words but because we are working with three different realities that don’t always see eye to eye. If we are constantly arbitrating an inner argument than how can we expect from our dreams anything less? Interp...

Some mornings, JP and I have breakfast while watching Pasquale’s Express Cooking. Most days I try to scroll through the tv programs in hope to catch something we’ve never watched before. Italian, Spanish, Chinese and English television often wins the draw. This morning though as I waited for Color Your World, a presentation on indoor decorating, I fell on a pregnancy show; which discussed post partum blues. After hearing the psychologist’s final words of wisdom I decided to close the television: It was definitely enough for the day! Perhaps JP noticed in the shake of my head that I was hiding some thoughts of my own on the topic because it was at that point she started asking lots of questions on the subject of pregnancy, children and shamanism. It’s not that I don’t believe in post partum blues actually I happen to know that it’s a sad reality and it is more and more predominant in our population of young mothers. Yet, I wonder how much of this particular depression is due to p...

I don’t know too many people now-a-days who can comfortably define the word family. What does it mean to be family? Do we have to be blood relatives? Does a family consist of grand-parents, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins? Does it matter to the definition if the family is functional or dysfunctional? For most people whom I surveyed for the purpose of this blog entry, family seems to hold the connotation of love, trust, respect, support and most of all happiness. There’s nobody out there who wants to be part of a family that doesn’t want them around or doesn’t care for them… Lets face it if we had to define family it wouldn’t be so much about blood but more so about the concept of relative: Individuals who gather together under a common ground. A few years ago while I was in the hospital for my kidneys I came across this older man (mid-60’s) who was synchronically looking for the office of the physician who was treating me at the time. He stopped me in the hallway and...