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| The Pounding Mill stream that flows through my sit spot, a place a visited almost daily while at Wild Roots. |
Kamana
In 2014, when I transitioned out of northern Virginia to the southern Appalachians here, I knew fear was a driving motivator: fear of a deteriorating natural environment with species loss, climate change, and farming soil loss, fear of social instability and anti-social government and corporate behavior, and fear that the money I was earning wasn't always going to be able to protect me from all these problems.I knew that fear was driving me away from a way of life I didn't like, and I wanted to feel drawn towards something beautiful, a way of life I felt excited to embrace each day. I didn't know what that 'something beautiful' was, nor how to feel spontaneously drawn towards it so that fear would not be motivating everything I did. Maybe that's been one of my big quests of the last few years.
Kamana has helped me find that something beautiful and helped me feel deeply drawn to that beauty each day.
Kamana is a guided self-study program created by Jon Young and others of the Wilderness Awareness School. I got the Kamana workbook and a big ol' stack of field guides, and their promise is that if I give a little time each day and follow the program outlined in the workbook, I will learn to “See through native eyes”: see the living world with all the richness, love, and deep understanding that a native does.
Each day I visit a sit-spot, a place where I go and just sit and listen and feel and watch and smell. I go at different times of day, in different weather and get to know that place more intimately than anywhere I've ever been. Each time when I visit, I pause and feel gratitude for the space, for the plants and stream and wind and mushrooms and birds. This sense of gratitude has helped me so much: I calm down, the running inner mind (what the Buddhists call the “Judging mind”, the Sufis call it the “Commanding Mind”) disappears, and there's no mental garbage between me and the sensual experience of being part of the land for a little while. The ego fades, and I notice so much more and feel so free.
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| The bathing space we made in the Pounding Mill, at the edge of the sit spot area. |
Instead of living 'in the mind', living life often as a series of tasks and being oriented to the human world of obligations and often-unhealthy social norms, I just get to be me, hanging out in the woods with a bunch of plants and animals just being themselves too, also with no laws, obligations, or unhealthy social norms like racism or sexism to deal with. And from that place of having no obligations to each other, we get to decide in each moment how to relate to each other. The plants don't generally run away, but the ground-birds usually flee as I approach, and then I get to learn how long the birds will wait before deciding I'm safe to be around (and which birds get comfortable soonest!).
And the birds will tell me if I'm feeling tensed or anxious, if I have that running mind, 'cause they vamoose and won't return! But when I relax and feel that gratitude and inner calm, often they'll eventually come back, and maybe even come pretty close.
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| My sit spot was basically the valley at the bottom of Wild Roots, which had the stream running through it and steep hills on most of the South, West, and East sides. In the middle was mostly thick underbrush and some tall trees, including basswood, buckeye, hemlock, tulip poplar, and others. |
This is making a big difference in my life now. I feel a deeper respect for the challenges of people who live very differently, not because I fantasize about their different life experience, but because I observe them carefully, consider the whole context of their lives, and ask meaningful questions. Single mothers, people with no college education, people who've never made more than minimum wage, people with a background of sexual trauma or who've faced police and corporate violence in support of a meaningful cause or for no apparent reason. All these and other life paths seem different than mine, and I'm finding that as I calm the running mind and learn to breathe deeply and listen, these differences present fewer and fewer barriers to understanding and to having a joyful, intimate friendship.
With this change, my romantic and friend relationships have become much richer. When I don't shame people for things they're used to being shamed for, or when I show interest or gratitude where others commonly don't, I get to hear really intimate stories of what challenges they face and what their life is really like. What's it like to be a woman married to a man who doesn't care about her sexual pleasure, but only his? What's it like being a single mother and hearing negative judgments about your mothering from others, including people who aren't themselves parents? What's it like being both black and latino and not being accepted in either community where you live? And how do white people treat you where you live?
The practices and attitudes suggested by the Kamana program, along with others I've picked up, are really helping me feel at home outside and more connected with the people around me. I feel pretty grateful for that!
Healing
The Kamana and self-healing practices clearly blend together! In addition to Kamana, I've studied a few radical psychotherapy practices developed in the early 20th century, particularly the body-based therapy developed by Wilhelm Reich and Gestalt therapy. A few highly recommended books from this research: The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich, Gestalt Therapy, Excitement and Growth in the Human Organism by Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, and Reichian Therapy, The Techniques for Home Use by Jack Willis (available free here). I found the Willis book through this Reichian site, another helpful resource. The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, which I wrote about here, along with others and my studies of native cultures, really laid the groundwork for how I appreciated these books.Their basic premise is that human children are born wild and, in civilized cultures, they're domesticated as they grow up. In this process, they start out sensing their needs and feelings in their whole body with great clarity and energy. In undomesticated cultures, they learn to sense internally and externally with ever more clarity and learn to take care of each of their needs independently of adults more or less as soon as they're physically able, including bringing in food and medicine, making fire and their own home, sensing their own body rhythms and so on.
In domesticated cultures, over time, children go through traumas where their needs aren't met: maybe a need for parental touch, or to explore a rich living environment, or to move energetically and laugh joyfully or to learn to meet their own food and shelter needs without parental support. Instead of loving mentoring or support, many people receive shame or punishment for experiencing sexual feelings as they grow up, expressing certain feelings like anger or dissatisfaction, or for basic bodily functions like pooping or menstruating. And when the need goes unmet for long enough, with no end of the frustration in sight, the kids develop coping mechanisms where they learn to disassociate from the frustrated feeling: first they suppress it (ignoring it), then they repress it (forgetting that they ignore the feeling, so that they're unaware that they even have the feeling or need – though it's still there!). Other coping mechanisms are possible too, but that's a simple mental model I've found valuable.
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| "I won't grow up. In me is the little child of my early days." I saw this message on a fence while walking through Raleigh, NC. July 2017. |
Imagine you're a kid...
Here's an of such a frustrating situation: Imagine being a 7 year old, full of vibrant life energy. You're curious to explore the streams and woods where you live, to play with friends, to contribute meaningfully to your family, to run around to exhaustion and then rest deeply. Now imagine that you're sent to a school where the teacher shows no interest in your feelings and desires, but demands that you sit still and quietly, while you must learn all sorts of abstract ideas and skills that do not respond to your felt needs. Your curiosity is shut down, as you're forced to show interest in things that don't matter to your sensed needs. You must ignore what you deeply want to do if you want to avoid punishment and retain your parents' love and stay in their good graces. Perhaps you're shamed or punished for feeling angry, humiliated, or scared at being ordered around constantly and having your needs ignored.Now the question is: how do kids actually obey in these life situations? No one ever tells the kid HOW to sit still when they want to move, day after day, year after year. And so each kid must figure out for themselves how to cope with this. One common way is to learn to breath poorly: constrict the throat and the upper chest and lower belly. Many learn to slouch. For analogy, imagine a kid's life energy is like a fire. If the fire needs to die down (if the kid needs to feel less energetic every day so they can sit still), then you can reduce the fire intensity by cutting off oxygen to it. Likewise, children learn to reduce their own metabolism – reduce their own vital life energy – by inhibiting their own breathing. I believe that children are born with a bright spark in their eye, full of wonder and curiosity and love, and then many lose that spark over time as they cope with these sorts of traumas. They learn to become duller, to not sense their own needs and instead respond to the needs of the authoritarian figures in their lives (i.e. adults who do not take the child's felt needs into account when supporting the child in growing up, imposing instead what the adult believes are the child's needs).
My experience with body-based therapies
I found the Reichian Therapy Home Book eye-opening when I learned how many different ways people respond to these traumas. One of Reich's big discoveries was that people develop chronic muscular tension as a physical embodiment of emotional trauma: developing the chronic tension is a coping mechanism and, therapeutically, it's where the emotional tension lives. And so that home-therapy book gives a program for working to recognize and release all of these chronic tensions that represent our own personal coping mechanisms we've developed over our life. And I learned to appreciate how commonly, due to these traumas and coping mechanisms, people learn to walk poorly, to breathe poorly, to make love poorly, to feel poorly, sleep poorly, see and hear and smell and taste and remember poorly.I'm learning slowly to release the tensions and feel more emotionally and physically capable and flexible. The Willis book makes some strange claims: as you release the tension around the eyes and forehead, for example, you will notice changes in the color intensity you perceive, your depth perception, your taste in music, and your focus and concentration. I can actually attest to all these from the self-work I've done. Recognizing and releasing the chronic tensions feels like powerful work.
The Gestalt Therapy book takes a different tack which I've also found very helpful. Half of the book outlines their theory of human neuroses: how they happen, why, and so on. Some parts in the theory section I found pretty dense and unhelpful, and other parts extremely illuminating. The section on 'abnormal anthropology', a description of the evolution of neurotic behaviors and how different cultures encourage or discourage them, was pretty eye-opening.
The other half of the Gestalt book gives a series of personal experiments you can do to recognize and heal your neurotic behaviors. With these, I'm learning to answer questions like: how do you respond, physically and emotionally (and I'm learning those are not so separate) under stressful situations of different kinds? When do you begin to feel tension or disassociate from your present experience? What happens next: do you try to dominate the situation, escape, go along? Do you breathe shallowly, tense the eyes or throat, and slouch or lean to one side? Do you fantasize only to realize you haven't been paying attention to your surroundings for some time?
The Gestalt practices are geared towards helping a person build awareness of those repressed feelings: feelings we learned as young children (and maybe later in life too) that it wasn't ok to feel. As I build self-awareness of these feelings, I decide consciously how I want to respond, instead of responding from unconscious fear or anxiety.
As an example: In the past I've struggled to have difficult conversations with a romantic partner, conversations where I sensed a possibility that she might want to end the relationship or might feel disappointed in me. I may want to have the conversation, and yet I'll have poor self-awareness and poor composure: maybe I'll disassociate and zone-out from fear or stress, or I'll respond with frustration or just try to please her without considering my own needs and whether I agree with her perspective. Often, many years ago, I responded without expressing how I felt at all, just trying to use logic and so-called rational explanations to clarify what I perceived as misunderstandings.
It's been a long process, but I'm learning to notice quickly when a feel constricted and when my breathing gets shallower, which are for me the muscular manifestations of emotional 'shutting down'. I sense more quickly when I feel fear or anger and then respond to it consciously: maybe I take 10 minutes or a day of alone time and then resume the conversation. I consciously breath deeper and more slowly. Often, in difficult conversations, I just tell the other person what feelings are coming up for me, not in an attacking way but just so they know what I'm experiencing in the moment. That openness and deep heart-sharing inevitably brings us closer together, whatever the other issues: it's a sign that I trust her, and helps her know what's going on for me so she need not guess (and feel stressed about guessing wrong about what's going on within me). I don't turn off or ignore the logical / rational thinking ability, I just integrate it as part of a whole-body way of understanding and responding to my own needs and another person's.
Over time I've grown so that I feel much less tension in such difficult conversations, and so I recognize those anxieties much sooner after they arise – maybe even as they arise! I'm learning to trust my friend or partner to hear how I'm feeling so that I don't need to cover it up or pretend to be stoic and unfeeling. All this also means others can trust me to hear how they're really feeling, knowing I won't judge them as good or bad, make assumptions about them, or respond from my own anxieties. We trust each other to respond to the other as they really are and how they're really feeling. And from that place of trust and mutual understanding, we can work through whatever the conflict is. Of course I don't trust everyone with all my feelings, but I'm conscious in each relationship and each moment what I feel comfortable sharing, and whether the relationship still feels rich enough with such limitations to continue. If not, I change or end the relationship.
As another example: I've learned to notice when I develop tension anywhere within me, including the shoulders. I read a book on strength training recently called Naked Warrior which references a Karate expert who notes that hunching the shoulders up or forward dramatically reduces striking power; it's a position of weakness. Seek a position of strength by pulling the shoulders down and back. And so my self-therapy is tying in with my strength and self defense training to help me find postures of comfort and strength. When I'm sitting with friends, or waiting for a ride, or whatever, I check my posture and ask: is this a position of strength or weakness? Am I blocking the windpipe by bending my head forward as I read at night, reducing air and the life force it represents within me? Am I tensing the throat too as I lean forward? In these ways, "spiritual" or 'energetic' practices don't seem esoteric or abstract, but rather very concrete and sensual - very feel-able. And as I learn to care about my tensions, the breathing, the corresponding senses of safety and strength, I find that feeds back into my self-confidence, ability to feel composed and present with others and set personal boundaries. It affects my ability to communicate clearly, and seek joyful or enriching experiences and avoid dulling ones.
I've found lots more benefits besides from these healing practices, but I hope this short explanation gives you a small taste of them. The foundational practices are self-awareness and self-love. Self-awareness means sensing continuously what I feel and desire in each moment, recognizing any tensions, breathing changes, or feelings as they arise. In this context, self-love just means believing that however I feel is ok, and I don't need to ignore any feelings. With awareness, I can choose to respond consciously to what I'm feeling: to move around, say yes or no, begin or end or change relationships as I desire, and so on.
Kamana and healing: integrated together
So you can see how the Kamana and healing work have seemed like an integrated practice at times: both combine a focus on awareness and empathy for living creatures of all sorts, including for me! In both, I learn to feel gratitude for the good things around and within, to calm down and sense what brings me pleasure. The phyplay [LINK] practice has also felt closely related: after years of feeling stiff and unrhythmic (especially dancing), I'm loosening up, moving more gracefully, feeling more purpose, feeling stronger and more physically capable and more relaxed in this body and with my relationships. I'm also feeling more comfortable setting personal boundaries, saying no when I feel like it, and expressing how I feel even when I'm pretty sure it's not how the other person wants me to feel.The short name for all this that my friends and I use is 'dealing with my shit'. I feel very happy that I've found and developed practices for dealing with… at least some of my shit. And life's feeling really fun right too. Not a coincidence, methinks.
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This is part of a series of posts describing my living situation (Wild Roots) and projects this summer and fall 2017:
