My totems

This blog entry is very personal. I share it with some trepidation. I think of it a witness, in some way, to a spirituality that deserves enormous respect and from which I draw strength.

     A couple of decades ago I experienced a time of “hitting the wall” that included several months of intensive therapy. At one point during that period I engaged in a process of creating a “Medicine Wheel” arrangement of totems. This consisted in spending periods of time (actually throughout a week) in selecting cards representing animal totems drawn from indigenous traditions of the Americas. The impact was, for me, extremely significant.

     This morning I returned to my cards and the arrangement. It should be understood that a medicine wheel arrangement is not intended to be a permanent one. It represents where I was at that time. To my surprise, it continues to speak to me very deeply. I hesitate to speak of something as personal as this but the time seems right.

     Let me, first of all, explain that the Medicine Wheel is a way of expressing the order of “Turtle Island” (the Americas especially North America). It has four directions which can be interpreted in many different ways. Most often, the directions indicated are East, South, West and North. (The order in which they are spoken may differ.) The meaning of each direction is also quite varied and I will not go into that. The important thing is that each animal totem is drawn in relation to one or other of the directions. Then there is a central or “mountain” totem that integrates all of them. The result is a picture of who you are at a given moment in your life.

     The search for the totems may take many forms. The Medicine Wheel seeks five. (The total number of totems is often considered to be nine. So, I only searched for five of those nine and at a given point in my life, but one that was a crucial “turning point” as I worked in therapy to create a new self from the ashes of what had gone before. And indeed they were ashes. Overnight, I had been forced to give up a life I had built for myself (in Latin America) and stop everything I had been doing for more than a decade. My family had disintegrated. My mother had died a painful death of cancer and my youngest brother had committed suicide. (Later, two of my sisters also did the same.)

      Drawing the totems in this context was, for me, a profound act of faith in the Spirit, who guides us; it was an effort to listen to what the Spirit was calling me to.

     At the time, I made a drawing of the layout of the results. About a year ago, I threw it away: perhaps a mistake. As a result I cannot recall the ordering of the four directions. This would have added another dimension to the significance of the totems. However, it does not seem to me to be crucial.

    So, the animals drawn were: the turtle, the mountain lion, the weasel, the moose and the bat. A strange combination. Each one came to me on a different day, so there was time to try to digest what they meant. When the whole came together they painted a picture for me of where I was, what my strengths were and where my path lay. I still think this was a significant moment in my life, even though, apart from the turtle and the bat, I have never actually “met” these animals. 

     Without going into great detail I would like to say something of the meaning given to me by each of the totems. (They are drawn from a work prepared by Jamie Sams and David Carson called Medicine Cards and published by Bear & Company, in New Mexico (1988), now republished by St. Martin Press.

      The turtle is very close to the Earth and with a tough protective surface, like the Earth. Also, it is an animal that moves slowly and carefully. Then there is the mountain lion: powerful leader who takes initiative without imposing on others. It is vulnerable to considerable criticism by others for its actions. Then there is the weasel. I was not terribly happy to have found that one. However, on reading and reflecting, I discovered that the gift of the weasel is to penetrate the enemy and discover what is really going on. The weasel knows beyond the surface. Then there is the moose, a creatures with a confident self-esteem that stands its ground and bellows its feelings for creating life. It is above all an animal of profound wisdom.  And finally, the central totem, the one that surprised me the most, was the bat. At first I was dismayed. A bat!  As a central totem?  Not very attractive! Yet, I found, it is a Mayan symbol proper to the shaman and involves death and rebirth into a new self by which shaman wisdom is born. However, There is an initiation undertaken by the Mayans through this spirit enters.  This involves actually going through a ritual death by being placed in the earth for an entire night in the forest sometimes with a blanket covering the hole.

     Interestingly enough, as part of the therapy of those months, there was a group exercise one day to act out a funeral and I found myself in the position of the one who had died. There I was, laid out in the middle of a small circle of people who attempted to express their feelings on seeing me lying there “dead.” For me, it felt like that shamanic death moment.

      There you are. You can imagine that these totems provided me with an intense feeling for the path that lay ahead, of the qualities I was being called to respond to, of where the Spirit was leading me. I want to note too that each totem has a contrary that points to the dangers that may be involved in holding to each of the totems and failing to pay attention to their message. Even today, as I review them, they touch me in a very deep place.