LIFEWEB
PSYCHOLOGY
A Lesson In Belonging
Michael J. Cohen
Indigenous Elders and healers are deeply rooted in their spiritual ways and tribal protocol. For this reason, a conflicting mixture of trepidation and honor filled me when I accepted an invitation to participate in the Belonging to Mother Earth Indigenous People's Conference in October, 1998. The purpose for this gathering of nature connected spiritual people from remote parts of the world was to help them teach their wisdom and healing powers to the 600 members of the public in attendance. My role was to show them and the attendees how to use the Natural Systems Thinking Process and Globally Balanced Thinking Score (GBT) as a means to close the destructive gap that exists between people of different cultures and that separates modern humanity from nature, too.
Although most people acknowledge that we are psychologically bonded to a way of thinking that produces the noxious personal and environmental effects of our schisms, few have the motivation to risk their emotional safety to produce greater interspecies and intercultural connectedness. My goal was to introduce an Earth connected interaction process that dependably, without pain, reconnected communities, as of old. This proved to be highly successful for those who were open to the process. However, it was my expertise as a traditional musician that identified where we have to go and how we may get there.
Many of the attending shamans and medicine people use music as part of their rituals. Their music and dance were performed, intact, as evening programs throughout the week. As did the others, I, too, volunteered my services as a veteran Anglo American folk song artist. They turned me down, "I was not an indigenous person," they said. Many members of the gathering disagreed with this decision and urged me to make efforts to correct it. "If we are here to heal the Earth in a good way, we must accept contributions from all members of the Earth community, including citizens of Western Society." they argued. With this rationale, I made further efforts to be included in the program. Finally its producer, a member of the Sioux Nation, somehow included me by the third evening of the five-day conference.
The challenge for the world, the conference and every citizen of Earth became obvious in the evenings that followed. The performers had their special time needs to properly present their sacred art, yet they also knew time was limited and other participants needed to be accommodated. A discomforting form of chaos followed. While performers would be on stage explaining to the audience the time pressure, and preaching how their heart-felt Earth rituals produced trust and unity, they necessarily ran well over their allotted time on-stage thereby eliminating the participation of others and causing mistrust, irritation and dissunity. The producer pleaded helplessness, it would be unconscionable for him to interrupt anybody's sacred presentation. He held a meeting of all the performers the following day. They pledged to each other and him to present their programs within a time frame they consented to. Within eight hours they again broke their pledges by surpassing their consensual time allotments in order to meet the spiritual parameters of their performance. The trust and unity they were dedicated to building became a sham, yet the delighted audience was never aware of the situation.
On the final evening, the producer solved the problem by prohibiting ceremonial performances. Instead, he requested that music only be presented in celebration of this moment: of the conference and its amazing participants. He personally orchestrated the evening and performers, minute by minute, nobody was left out, all belonged. A special spirit of elation bound together by music and dance came into being and we created a unifying occasion of extraordinary proportions. The drums beat together from the Congo, rain forests and Siberia for most of the night.
The producer had become a catalyst that helped this unifying spiritual moment occur. He acted out the same role that is played by the Natural Systems Thinking Process when it is used in our daily lives. The Process introduces Earth's web of life, the interconnected animal, plant and mineral kingdom, into our consciousness and immediate relationships. Like the producer, and as throughout the eons, the web embraces all. It becomes the story to heed for living in the moment. This orchestrates individual and global unity without producing garbage, nothing is left out. When engaged in the process, everything senses it belongs.
Contact:
Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D.
P.O. Box 1605, Friday Harbor WA 98250
(360) 378-6313.
Email: nature@pacificrim.net
Internet: www.ecopsych.com
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