Autumnal Equinox 2001
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Celtic and related spiritual traditions focus on aligning the self with the Sacred, making it possible for us each to manifest our divine nature through action in the world. The burning hand symbolises this concept.
Ruthless Compassion
Sometimes there are no words. An event hits you like a splintered board in the face, whether you're directly involved or a stunned bystander. The events of the last weeks have sent shock waves of pain endlessly outwards, from the immediate victims to their families and friends to all the rest of us.
David and I were at a conference when it happened. We went into the media center and watched the World Trade Center go down and the Pentagon burn. Is there anything that can help in the face of the kind of pain that we are seeing and feeling? There is.
The first thing to do when we're hit with pain is to deal with the immediate experience in that moment. Second, we have to adjust our philosophy to accommodate the reality of pain in the world and make meaning of it.
Generally, there are few moments of overwhelming pain in our lives. It only takes a moment to learn that a loved one has died, a relationship has ended, or a diagnosis is bad. Memories of those moments torment us, but to limit the pain it helps to think only about the now. Focus on nature, on your surroundings, your breath. A friend of my mother's who'd been tortured in WWII said that the only way he got through, even when in agony, was focussing in the now. He didn't think about whether he could survive it for a week, a day or five minutes, but only if he could he survive it now, in this instant, and then the next as it arrived.
When you feel you cannot endure another minute inside your skull, try and get out of it. Do something, anything, to shift focus off yourself. At those times when I have felt I could do nothing about my own pain, I tried to do something about another's. We can always help someone else, in however small a way, even when we can't seem to help ourselves.
Remember that pain is finite. As I once heard a doctor ruefully say, all bleeding stops eventually.
In the long term the way we can change our experience of pain is through our understanding.
First, we must remember that on the human level we're not alone. All of us experience loss during the course of our lives. A woman once went to the Buddha because she couldn't recover from her child's death. He said he could heal her, but only if she obtained a mustard seed from a house that hadn't known death. Of course, she couldn't, and realized she was not alone.
The second thing that can help is the knowledge that God is also with us in our pain. Life is not something God did to us. When God, the Mother, Father and Creator, made the universe, They created it out of Their own beings.
Think about it — what else did They have to use? This means that God is compassionate in a literal sense: He is a Co-sufferer.
I once took a spirit journey about a murder that evoked feelings of disgust and helplessness in me, similar to what many of us felt on September 11th.
One night I was listening to the news and a gruesome story of the sort we're all, sadly, getting used to came on. It involved the hideous deaths of a child and animal at the hands of another child. I asked the Spirits if there was anything I could do, and they said I should go and guide their souls to the Otherworld. My totems guided me on a spirit journey to the place they'd been killed, and we found them. We did some healing for them, then took them to a healing temple in the Otherworld. Despite knowing they were now at peace, I felt awful.
As I was sitting outside the temple where I'd left them, the Dagda, the primary Celtic manifestation of God the Father, came to me as a tall, beautiful, aquiline featured man, with long dark hair. He is radiant and glorious, with a penetrating gaze. He looked at me as only He can, and spoke two words.
"Even this."
It was hard to accept.
"Even this is necessary in a free creation." He said.
People's actions can be so repugnant, in large and small ways, my own included. I felt ashamed. I asked him, "Why do you bother with humans at all?"
"I am you, my souls, my selves."
I knew that the Dagda, the Father, the Mórrígan, the Mother, and the Initiator or Creator unfolded creation out of Themselves, but I hadn't fully felt the implications of Their act until that moment. I realized that each of Them participate in, and fully experience, all that we do.
"You see where My sacrifice is. I must allow Myself to do this to Myself. This idea is in the Christian doctrine as well — suffering all sin, all separation, on the cross. I allow Myself to do these things to Myself so you may come to a perfect love, a conscious unification of the Field of Being, or I will remain no different than when I first set the wheel in motion. We are part of each other's evolution. I am near to you as your heart's blood, nearer than your breath, dearest. What I do I have done for you."
I felt a greater love for Him than I had ever felt. The pain of such a sacrifice is unimaginable, and yet He is profoundly joyous in it. It reminded me of the story in a Gnostic gospel where Christ went to the crucifixion singing. In Norse mythology, Odin was sacrificed on the world tree, "Myself sacrificed unto Myself" to receive the mystery of the runes which He then shared with humanity.
I felt very small and insignificant in relation to Him, to all His acts. The Dagda laughed his great booming laugh.
"This is so," He said, "but you are also the Goddess. As a manifestation of Our Energy you may partake of more or less of it at your choosing. Choose more."
His words in this journey, "Even this," have become a mantra to me when confronted with pain. They remind me of the purpose of pain, part of the greater purpose of creation. As the saying goes, the person who has a why to live for can bear just about any how. There's also no getting around the fact that he said it's our choice how much Divinity we embody. "Choose more." can be a mantra too. In union with the Sacred, what happens here can hurt, but never truly harm us.
The journey above confronted me with some difficult truths, one being that there is nothing that isn't part of God. Once, when lecturing to a group of Christian students about the Primal understanding of God, I realized how difficult it can be to understand that God is all things, not just love, peace, and so on. Where for me the scariest thought would be that anything could exist that isn't God, some people are afraid of a God who isn't totally "good," who doesn't fit in a tidy box.
If this is difficult for you, try thinking of it this way: by creating all of us as individual beings, God gave us an unparalleled gift in pure love. He also made evil possible if we choose it, accepting that He, too, would experience not only the suffering a being choosing evil causes others, but the suffering that being inflicts on itself. In this way, even the most evil person or acts can still be seen as an example of God's perfect love, a love that holds nothing back from our freedom and becoming. A love which evokes our answering devotion by its ruthless ardor.
Evil, disharmonious acts can seem overwhelming, but only because we don't take all acts into account. If we reflect on it, we realise that every tree demonstrates God's harmony. Beyond this, every perfect leaf on that tree, every cell in the leaves and the bark, each element that makes up the cells, and every atom in those elements, is an act of perfect good, an act of perfect harmony. When we look at it this way, we realize that all the harmonious acts contained in one tree numerically far outweigh all the evil acts people have ever done on this planet.
To practice joy, we must look at the world with compassion, not empathy. Compassion means we recognize, literally, re-cognize or "know again" the truth that we are one with all beings. We are one with the suffererers. However, and this is all important, the one that we are is Divine.
Compassion never forgets this truth, and holds the Divine within a sufferer from a divine perspective. Compassion sees the sufferer as a Divinity having a human experience. Compassion knows that pain is finite, and the Sacred infinite.
Empathy, by contrast, holds the pain in a sufferer from a human perspective. Empathy is so absorbed by the pain of the other that it amplifies the pain, within the self and the other. It blurs the boundaries, so that finite pain appears to be infinite suffering.
The equation is simple. We energetically support what we focus on. If we focus on pain, we perpetuate it, if we focus on the Divine then that's what our energy supports and amplifies.
Loss and pain are necessary parts of creation's dance — to say that this should not be is to say no to being. To be truly compassionate, we must say yes to all creation, while working to alleviate suffering. We must say yes to creation's entirety even when we take arms against evil acts. While fighting, we must acknowledge that the enemy is as divine as we are.
Of course, coming to terms with pain also means coming to terms with those who inflict it. In a recent interview, John Lydon said that anger is useful, because it's motivational, whereas hate just eats you away. Hate binds you to its object, while anger, consciously expressed and released, can remove the object. However, the object of our anger is also part of creation and part of God — including terrorists and those who support them.
Demonizing the enemy makes it too easy on us. If we choose to fight and kill, it should be for survival, and we should never let ourselves off the hook by thinking of the enemy as wholly "other." It's only in the full knowledge of their divinity that we can decide whether war is worth it.
An enemy is also a mirror. They may reflect a distorted image, but they'll always show us something we wouldn't otherwise see. In a just war, we may choose to kill the enemy, but we should never choose to ignore what they can show us about ourselves, including what made them the enemy.
WORKSHOPS
Glastonbury, England
Rescheduled for July 20th to 27th 2002
for more pictures go to: http://www.celticshamanism.com/glastonbury.html
Please note that the correct address to apply to is:
As you may know this workshop had to be cancelled in 2001 due to problems accessing the prehistoric sites during Britain's foot and mouth outbreak. To avoid spreading the disease, movement around the countryside was actively discouraged and so rather than carrying on with a severely reduced tour, we decided that the responsible thing to do would be to reschedule it for the summer of 2002. While some aspects of the trip remain the same, others have evolved to reflect insights that have arisen over the past year.
We have always lived in the landscape. Our ancestors were deeply affected by certain places, some of which they enhanced with built structures. These include the megalithic monuments of Southern Britain, like Stonehenge and Avebury. Both the landscape and the structures continue to affect us to this day. No one is wholly unmoved by such places.
This workshop, Cameron's first in Glastonbury, focuses on connecting with the past while experiencing the sites in the present. Think of this understanding as a stream. While we can't step in exactly the same water our ancestors did, we can try to feel the same currents. As we journey through the sites, we'll strive to experience them on all levels, looking at light, shadow, colour, acoustics and form, and how the sites work within the landscape. We'll also use shamanic techniques of drumming, chant and the spirit journey to experience the sites on more subtle levels. At Stonehenge our group will have a private hour at sunset for ritual and meditation by arrangement with English Heritage.
Although the megalithic monuments we'll be visiting are pre-Celtic, the world-view built into them will be much closer to that of the Celts than a modern Westerner's. The roots of Celtic tradition must lie in what came before it. Celtic literature and folklore shows that these sites continued to exercise a fascination long after their builders were dust. Glastonbury, where we'll be based, has many examples of interaction between earlier and later cosmologies that we'll examine during the week. At the Chalice Well we'll explore the symbolism of the Vesica Piscis and experience the healing powers of the waters. At the White Spring, we have the opportunity to spiritually journey through an Otherworld entrance of legend. The Abbey, linked to both King Arthur and Joseph of Arimathea, gives us a place to meditate on different strands of later mystical thought.
The range of insight that Glastonbury evokes gives us the opportunity to venture into aspects of spiritual practice that Cameron hasn't covered in other workshops. These include more intensive instruction on protection in spiritual work, and the interweaving of Primal Celtic, Alchemical, Kabbalistic and other elements of European ritual magic.
Our work at the ancient sacred sites will focus on the concepts they suggest, such as death and rebirth, the union of masculine and feminine, the communion between heaven and earth, the relationship of microcosm to macrocosm, and the continuing cycles of life. The stones, raised through faith, have an eternal meaning because they refer to a human relationship with the cosmos, over and above any one culture's reading of it. The stones' enduring nature demonstrates a quality we must cultivate. In Old Irish iress, faith, literally means "on-standing" or enduring, a clear and potent metaphor.
Archaeologist David Trevarthen, MA (Hons), PIFA, FSA Scot, is co-faculty for this retreat. His current research examines the megalith builders' own experience of the sites, based in an understanding of human perception and his personal observations over extended stays at the sites. He'll guide us on an exploration of some sites in the region, including Weyland's Smithy, Avebury and Stonehenge.
Glastonbury and the surrounding areas offer us incredible scope for physical and spiritual exploration. The week's work can give us touchstones for the future based on the keystones of the past.
Cost: $1590 / £1060 for applications before 1st December 2001
$1690 / £1130 for applications before 1st February 2002
$1790 / £1200 for applications after 1st February 2002
The cut-off date for applications is 1st May 2002.
Fees are payable by personal check or money order drawn on US or UK banks in US dollars or pounds sterling, made payable to Geo Cameron. Fees include food, lodging, and all admissions and travel during the workshop. It does not include international air fare or other transport to Glastonbury. Lodging is generally in double rooms, with a few single rooms and triples. Single rooms will be given on a first come, first served basis, upon request. Couples should request a double bed room when they apply, since these are limited. Upon acceptance, you'll be sent all relevant details for the workshop and forms for you to indicate special diet needs, etc. Because of the limited enrolment, the full amount must be paid upon application and no refunds can be given, so it's strongly recommended that you get trip insurance in case illness or accident prevent your attendance.
Application: If you've studied with Geo Cameron at one of her Mull retreats, no application is necessary. Simply send the tuition fee and a letter asking to be enrolled in the workshop. If you have not attended a Mull retreat, please include a two to three page letter describing yourself along with the payment. This should say something about your spiritual path, your ethical code, and why you'd like to attend the workshop.
OTHER EVENTS
Expanded Course descriptions available at: http://www.celticshamanism.com/courses.html
In between newsletters, an updated workshop schedule is available at: http://www.celticshamanism.com/workshops.html
Lectures These Friday lectures are open to everyone. I discuss Celtic spiritual tradition and the theme of the workshop to follow on the weekend. They include chant in Old Irish and meditation, so they're a good place to have a "taster" of the work. Friday, March 22nd, 2002, 7-9 PM, Boise, Idaho. Contact Idaho sponsor, below.
Workshops
All workshops combine lecture, chant, meditation and shamanic techniques.
The Wolf's Trajectory: Finding Your Bliss While You Hunt for Him
The wolf aims at a point ahead of her quarry, she does not chase after it. To follow the wolf's trajectory is to aim ahead. It is to use your desire for a particular sort of man to point you to your life path, or to the next great experience on that path.
October 20th, 2001, Edinburgh, Scotland. The Salisbury Centre, 2 Salisbury Rd., Edinburgh, EH16 5AB. 0131-667-5438.
For more info see: http://www.celticshamanism.com/courses.html
New Workshop: Rebirth
This workshop focusses on releasing figments of the past and fears of the future to live in the now — the only thing that is truly real. Exploring themes of rebirth as celebrated at this time of year in Primal Celtic, Christian and other traditions, we have the chance to actively decide what we're living for and affirm it in the ritual of rebirth that concludes the workshop.
March 23nd-24th, 2002, 10AM to 5PM, Boise, Idaho. Polly A. Petersen, 208-331-1936.
Circle of Fire, Circle of Stone: Celtic Shamanism
This workshop traces the history and cosmology of Celtic shamanism and its applications to life. The use of chant, meditation, and the spirit journey, create the opportunity to connect with Celtic Deities, totems and ancestral spirits.
April 5th–7th, 2002. Rowe, Massachusetts. Rowe Camp and Conference Center, King's Highway Road, Rowe, Mass., 01367 / Phone: 413-339-4954, website: www.rowecenter.org, email: retreat@rowecenter.org.
For more info see: http://www.celticshamanism.com/courses.html
Over the Ninth Wave: An Illumination of Primal Western Spirituality
September 13th to 15th, 2002, Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, New York.
In Celtic myth, the Milesians come over Nine Waves, symbolizing their harmony with the Celtic cosmic structure, to land on the Irish Coast. Their shaman, and Cameron's kinsman, Amergin, recited a poem, saying: "I am a wild boar in valor, I am a salmon in water...I am the God who brings fire to the mind." This reflects a Western idea of enlightenment: harmonization of the self with the Sacred, rather than dissolving the self in the Sacred. This harmony inspires action in the world. In this experiential workshop we explore ways of bringing the Sacred into our daily lives, using the Celtic myths and traditions as our model.
To be placed on Omega's mailing list and notified when their catalog comes out, contact Omega at: Omega Institute, 150 Lake Drive, Rhinebeck, New York, 12572-3212. Phone: 845-266-4444. Website: www.eomega.org
New Workshop: Immram: A Voyage on the Ocean of Being
The ancient Irish tale Immram Maelduin, or the Voyage of Maelduin, gives us a mythic map through life. Maelduin begins his journey as a quest to revenge his father's murder and ends it in the fulfillment of forgiveness and fellowship. We journey along with Maelduin, learning from both the myth and from our own experiences of the spiritual islands he passed through.
September 21st-22nd, 2002, Boulder, Colorado. Marian Rose, 303-670-9176.
For more info see: http://www.celticshamanism.com/courses.html
Telephone Counselling
In ancient Celtic tradition, the anama chara or "soul-friend," was your confessor, healer and guide through all life's passages. The anama chara relationship encouraged awareness of the Divine as an active presence, and helped you maintain the strength of this connection through right action. The security of this bond meant you could bear life's oscillations nobly, experiencing union without clinging and loss without despair. Today, an anama chara can act in the same way, to help you heal past wounds, support you through present transitions and prepare you for future growth.
In our modern world it is often difficult to maintain such a close personal relationship with a spiritual teacher as the distances involved may prevent frequent contact. Beginning around January 2002, Geo Cameron will be offering a counselling service where she will act as your anama chara, using telephone consultation and email correspondence to generate and maintain a close supportive bond. The nature of this relationship and the work done will be tailored to each individual's needs, and can range from personal counselling and "life-coaching" to guided spiritual study.
Counselling will be booked by annual subscription only and will be available to a limited number. For a single annual fee of $900 / £600 you will receive; 10 1-hour telephone consultations spread across the year and 10 email sessions scheduled to fall between phone consultations. This fee includes all phone charges as you will not be required to call out using your phone-line. Anyone enrolled for this will also get priority booking for face to face counselling when Geo is in their area, though this will be charged separately.
Due to the nature of the energetic connection necessary in this kind of work the service is initially only being offered to people who have already worked with Geo in counselling sessions or at workshops. Others may be considered on a case by case basis if a full background is provided and a face to face session set up for the earliest opportunity.
Apply by post or email with a two to three page letter describing yourself as a person (as above for the Glastonbury retreat). tuath at celticshamanism dot com (Sorry this is not a direct e-mail link. It is written as above, without the @ symbol, to avoid spam. Thanks for your understanding!)
For more on Geo's healing work, go to http://www.celticshamanism.com/healing.html
Depending on demand, Geo will be available for individual work as follows:
New York City: April 2nd and 3rd, and September 10th and 11th 2002
Boston: April 9th and 10th 2002
Boulder, Colorado: September 17th and 18th 2002
Washington, D.C.: March 29th-30th and September 5th and 6th 2002
CD of Trance Music The long awaited CD of music for meditation and the spirit journey, featuring Celtic chant, bagpipe drone and drum will be printed by March 2002. You'll be sent ordering information when it's ready.
And last but not least — Geo is also looking into the possibility of launching an email 'school' to teach the principles and practice of Celtic Shamanism and related disciplines. It is envisioned that this will involve sending out work modules and practical exercises to registered students for them to work on privately. Registering would also give access to a private internet chat room to discuss the work as part of a virtual campus, getting feedback from other students and joining in on-line discussions with Geo or other guest tutors. This is still in the development stage but any feedback would be welcome. For Geo's biography see http://www.celticshamanism.com/gc.html |
The Sacred Thorn, Glastonbury
At Chalice Well
