Wheels In Motion
clarifying intentions, medicine wheels, and integration quests
One of the things you are supposed to do before a psychedelic ceremony is set an intention. What is bringing you to the ceremony? What are you hoping the medicine will show you? What would you like to gain, or let go of? That kind of thing. It can be quite vague, but the more specific your intention is, the better. Or so some say.
I was thinking about my intention a lot in the days leading up to my last ceremony. My first ceremony, the year before, had been a beautiful, powerful, astonishing experience. It’s memory of it stayed with me, but the mega-chill vibes I’d left it with did not. What was it that was wrong in me, and/or in my life, that I couldn’t just be content with things as they were? And if there were things in me and/or my life that did need changing, why couldn’t I just identify them clearly, and deal with them decisively? And could taking the same truffles again, at the same centre, really help, in a lasting way, when their joyful effects at the first retreat had not proven an enduring match to the tenacity of my brain’s most anxious energy?
But for all the questions clattering around my brain, none emerged as the single, clear query I wanted to put to the mushrooms.
The centre had, as it happened, changed the itinerary for their two night retreats. When I’d gone the year prior, everyone just showed up, briefly introduced themselves, and got stuck into the shrooms without further ado. This time, rather than diving in at the deep end, there was a programme of activities to help us prepare. Yoga, breathwork, and something called a medicine wheel ceremony.
If you Google ‘medicine wheel’, the results are varied - as should be expected from something practiced by many Native American tribes over many millennia. Sometimes it’s called a wheel, and sometimes a hoop. Sometimes it’s large, and sometimes it’s small. Sometimes it is a circle marked out on the ground with stones, and sometimes it's a hand-held object made from materials like animal hide. The circle is divided into quarters, each with a different colour, and each associated with different properties, like seasons, elements, directions, stages of life, plants, animals.
The way it was done at the ceremony I went to, was that our group laid out five stones; one to mark the centre, and the others to mark each of the four directions. The whole thing was maybe three metres across. Again, there isn’t any consensus which colour or animal or other property goes in which quadrant, but the fellow guiding the ceremony at our retreat told us that each direction was associated with a different aspect of the self, and with a different animal spirit. As such:
East - Mind - Eagle
South - Heart - Coyote
West - Soul - Bear
North - Body - Buffalo
We were all given scraps of paper, and told to write our intention on them. This was only supposed to take a minute, but I still hadn’t figured out how to articulate my general befuddlement into one good question. With all the others finished and waiting for me, I scribbled, “Where do I belong?” Which, though written in haste, actually seemed like a good question. Because it sounded nice and concise and specific. But it was actually big and vague enough be interpreted a number of ways, and thus could serve as a Tojan horse for a whole host of smaller questions regarding the many facets of my life that were troubling me: geographic, social, vocational, financial…
And then, holding our questions in our hands and in our thoughts, all twenty or so of us were told to find a spot next to one of the four outer stones. And then we were to put our questions, silently, to the animal spirit associated with the stone we stood nearest. And proceed clockwise until, stone by stone, we’d made our way around the circle.
Obviously, my brain had some reservations. In part because I’d been reading Françoise Bourzat’s book, Consciousness Medicine, on the train ride to the Netherlands, and had just read a passage warning journeyers against the appropriation of the rituals of other cultures. The guy leading us in this ceremony said he had studied with Native American teachers. But he himself was one of the whitest people you could ever meet, and it did seem a little funny to have this guy with a Dutch accent, out in Dutch farmland, burning imported sweetgrass and sage, and tipping out little piles of cornmeal on the ground. Was this the sort of thing Bourzat was warning against? Or was the rational part of my brain just looking for reasons to resist anything that it flagged-up as new age nonsense - i.e. asking the spirit of a buffalo for career guidance?
I decided it didn’t really matter what my reservations were. I was there to transcend the proven limitations of my rational mind, and that required that I surrender myself to the hippies and just go along with their programme with as much openness as possible.
I had intended to start in the East, with the eagle, and the mind. I think because that’s where the sun rises, but maybe because my brain would try to start in its own quarter. I wasn’t alone in that idea though, and that stone had attracted the most folks. I ended up having to walk all the way around the circle, to the least popular stone: North. The final quadrant, which, in many versions of the circle, is white, and associated with death.
North (Body / Buffalo)
I took my place, and turned to face North. The animal we had been told to think of for North was a buffalo, which I had a hard time with, as I didn’t think of them as a particularly northern species. Surely, the North stone should have an animal common up towards the Arctic, like a musk ox, or caribou, or seal, right? But I stood there, and imagined landscapes stripped bare and white with ice and snow, and thought about my question: Where do I belong?
And what came to me was an answer that was easy, and clear, and as steady as my feet on the Earth: I know exactly where I come from.
Which is true. I was born and raised in Alaska - about as northern a place as there is. And growing up in that land is my only experience of feeling that I belonged, unequivocally, in a place and time and community. Of course, if I think about it, and sift through my memories, the picture becomes more muddled, the relationship more complicated. But on a primal level, I know exactly where I come from. And every strata of my conscience seemed pretty clear on that.
East (Mind / Eagle)
Next, I made my way over to the East stone. An eagle was easier to think about. Maybe because I had seen so many of them growing up. Or because I could see no problem with this directional-animal pairing. I posed my question again: Where do I belong?
All the ease and clarity I’d experienced at the North station was swiftly blown away by a flurry of worrying questions: Where can I go? What shall I do? What can I offer? How will I live? Who are my people?
These questions, and the way they tumbled after each other, making it impossible to focus on one at a time, and thus overwhelming me, were precisely what had brought me back to the retreat. They consumed a huge amount of my attention and energy in my ‘normal’ life, and locked my whole being into one tense, ineffective knot.
But thinking the question, Who are my people?, in the context of the cardinal directions, it occurred to me that many of ‘my people’, were actually from the East. All of my living family are on the very West of the US. But the entirety of my mother’s family had come to America from Eastern Europe. From cities like Kyiv, and from a smattering of shtetls that might have been in Poland, Russia, or Belarus, depending on what year’s map you referenced. And for nearly four years, I have been living two blocks from the former Berlin Wall. I cross the still clearly demarcated border between Eastern and Western Europe on almost a daily basis. This constant crossing, coupled with the abominable war just the other side of Poland from my flat, makes me think of the historic and enduring differences between the East and West all the time. And this awareness was with me at the East stone, too.
South (Heart / Coyote)
Next was South. We’d been told to think of a coyote. I encountered the odd coyote when I lived in California, but I was most familiar with the animal in the context of myth. As a great fan of ‘trickster’ figures, I knew the defining thing about coyote in these tales was that he was always hungry. I thought of this, and of the heart. Of my own heart. And how much energy and love I had put into creating work that had mostly been met with indifference or rejection - year after year after year. All the love I had for my writing that no one seemed to want. All of the messages I’d sent out that had gone unanswered. And how much it all hurt. And my bewilderment as to what the fuck else I should be doing with my life, if not the work I loved best. And my question suddenly became a plea that caught in my chest: Show me what to do with this voracious hunger to share my love.
West (Soul / Bear)
Lastly, I approached the West stone. We’d been told to think of a bear here. This was no problem. I’d seen loads of bears my whole childhood. Black and Grizzly. All summer long, they wandered in and out the woods around my house, and around the rest of our town. Looking for garbage, burgers, or whatever else caught their nose. The view from where I stood by the West stone was of a thick border of trees between the retreat’s property and the neighbour’s. And I suddenly remembered hiking, in my early teens, in the 90s, and spotting a pair of dark, round, furry ears, over in branches not so different than the ones before me here in 2023. I remembered it so clearly, I could easily envision the creature in the trees before me. Hello Mama Bear. I see you in the trees. I am one of you now. So where am I to raise my own cub?
Because I have a four year old. And so, questions of what might be best for my life are thoroughly ensnared in what might be best for his. Raising him well is of course my primary concern. That is very clear to me. But the details of what that should look like aren’t always so clear.
I had gone into this exercise with zero expectations, and was pleasantly surprised to have it prove so impactful. Just by standing in four different spots, and recalibrating my attention very slightly, an entirely different facet and energy of my question and my life was revealed. I am not sure how much the content of what I experienced during the wheel ceremony carried over into the mushroom ceremony. But it certainly revealed and refined my intention, and that of course had a major effect on my experience in the mushroom realm. Which I continue to try to work through, comprehend, and integrate.
In going back over my experiences with each of the four directions, it struck me that while three of them replied to my question with further questions, one of them offered no query whatsoever. Only an answer, emanating in rock-steady certainty; I know exactly where I come from.
And I decided, if I am so very preoccupied with worrying about where I belong in this world, I really ought to revisit the one place that I did once belong. And that I had not, as of my walking of the medicine wheel, set foot in for twenty-two years.
So now I have. I just got back from ten days in Alaska. It took a good bit of prep to get everything ready before I left, and then I was just totally immersed in the trip (and massively jet-lagged) the whole time I was there. That’s why it’s been a whole month since my last post. I am still processing the trip, but I am certain that a big piece of my personal integration puzzle has plopped into place as a result of that journey. I expect to have more to say about that soon. In the meantime -
What about you? Have you participated in a medicine wheel ceremony? Or know of a good place to learn more about them? Do you have any other rituals that you find helpful for intention setting? Have you taken any steps on your integration path this summer that feel important? Are you a fellow Alaskan? Replies to these or other questions I’ve neglected to ask are all welcome.
Thanks for continuing to share your words. This was my first encounter with them; they're lovely.
I remember reading years ago that the Radiohead chaps all stayed put in their hometown (at least for some period of time), because it's what gave them their mojo.
I come from small town brain drain rural decay in central Pennsylvania, and yet even for me, spending time walking there wakes things in me.
I saw this lengthy D. H. Lawrence quote shortly after reading your post. It seems to speak eloquently to the medicine wheel experience. Maybe to the mushroom experience, too:
"Birds fly portentously on the walls of the tombs. The artist must often have seen these priests, the augurs, with their crooked, bird-headed staffs in their hand, out on a high place watching the flight of larks or pigeons across the quarters of the sky. They were reading the signs and the portents, looking for an indication, how they should direct the course of some serious affair. To us it may seem foolish. To them, hot-blooded birds flew through the living universe as feelings and premonitions fly through the breast of a man, or as thoughts fly through the mind. ...If the augur could see the birds flying in his heart, then he would know which way destiny too was flying for him.
...And if you live by the cosmos, you look in the cosmos for your clue. If you live by a personal god, you pray to him. If you are rational, you think things over. But it all amounts to the same thing in the end. Prayer, or thought, or studying the stars, or watching the flight of birds, or studying the entrails of the sacrifice, it is all the same process, ultimately: of divination. All it depends on is the amount of true, sincere, religious concentration you can bring to bear on your object. An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. And you choose that object to concentrate upon which will best focus your consciousness. Every real discovery made, every serious and significant decision ever reached, was reached and made by divination. The soul stirs, and makes an act of pure attention, and that is a discovery.
...Whatever object will bring the consciousness into a state of pure attention, in a time of perplexity, will also give back an answer to the perplexity. But it is truly a question of divination."
--Excerpt from "The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia 1", in Sketches of Etruscan Places, by D.H. Lawrence