Being Aware July 6th 2010

Being Aware-

The last time I lived in a relatively pristine Alpine environment where there are only about 40,000 people in the whole county it was 1992. There is something that happens if you take the time to slow down enough to sense all the nature around you, especially if you have experienced it before while growing up or during your life. As your senses reopen slowly as they tend to you begin to have different kinds of dreams than you would in a city area. You start to experience everything much differently the more remote that you are. In fact, if you haven’t had the experience before being alone like this can actually be quite problematic for people new to a remote experience without TV, radio, cell phone service and Internet. Hopefully, your GPS device works and it is better if your life is not depending upon its working especially if you don’t know the area. If it works in an emergency, great! But just like a cell phone, you can’t always depend upon it for one reason or another (like if you accidentally drop it on the ground, into a river or lake or pond etc.)

So, the more you are used to all the various kinds of dreams, temporary hallucinations and other differences like a climate you aren’t used to, one must take the time to adapt oneself so bad things don’t tend to happen that you might not recover from as soon as you want to.

Obviously, the younger and the healthier you are down to about 12 years old the better for being adaptable to new situations.

However, for someone like myself that was taught to navigate the wilderness with or without trails since I could first walk and before that in my father’s backpack taking care of myself in the remote wilderness is second nature. However, now at 62 I don’t like to sleep in a sleeping bag on rocks anymore (I gave this up at 21 when I got snowed on at Mt. Whitney and woke up a living pretzel.)

However, I still kept climbing and sleeping in the snow for one more year until my friends and I almost literally froze to death in a freak snow storm at about 8000 feet elevation on Mt. Shasta that dumped 3 feet of powder snow on top of a 3 foot base of one foot pack and two foot powder so we had a total of 5 feet of powder which is almost impossible to snowshoe in without taking about 30 seconds to pack down each step. Luckily, one of us knew how to dig a snow cave so we survived that one. When we got up the next morning our Levi Jeans froze solid except for the knees. This kept us from freezing to death as the ice insulated us from the cold air, which was about 20 degrees Fahrenheit at, that time or less.

After spending 4 days recovering in a hotel bath all the joints in my body continued to hurt for several years after that experience. All climbers above us on the mountain lost at the very least some fingers and toes. We didn’t lose any appendages but our joints hurt for years.

That was the last night I tried to camp in the snow on purpose. It was Christmas Vacation 1970 from college. I was 22.

When I was 32 I met several Medicine men in Northern California and Oregon. There are many different types of Medicine Men. However, I learned that there were two that I found had something important to teach me. There may have been more but mostly it was about proximity. In other words one has to be near enough the Medicine Men (or women) that you want to study with to actually learn anything from them in the wilderness. Though you might learn something from them online or in printed books it is always best to be out in the wilderness with them and learning from them personally. Experience is the best teacher wherever you are on earth. It is as much different as learning about having kids from a book and actually having and rising kids yourself. There really is no comparison.

So, when I began to have deeper relationships with the wilderness from sweating in sweat lodges with medicine men and women I was pretty surprised by it all. My dreams were different and everything in my life changed a lot. One of my medicine men would show up in my dreams wearing a buckskin jacket with long fringe on it so I would recognize him and help me with things. I had these kinds of experiences with Tibetan lamas too, so I knew I was actually getting somewhere. We would have conversations in my dreams but they would usually be more aware of what they were doing than I would when I was in my 30s. Whether they were true medicine men or Tibetan Lamas they all seemed to be comfortable with soul travel and walking through other people’s dreams and helping in all sorts of ways. I have always found this quite comforting when people have consciously come into my dreams to help me in my waking and sleeping life. I have been very blessed by this.

I believe one of the most important things in life is to build a network, a family of spiritual workers on each other’s mutual behalf. This can catapult a person or group forward very quickly into amazing paths of enlightenment and healing.