FINDING MY RELIGION

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 FINDING MY RELIGION
A modern shaman talks about his life and what ancient wisdom can offer our 21st century world
David Ian Miller, Special to SF Gate

Monday, October 17, 2005

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/10/17/findrelig.DTL&hw=TRIBE&sn=001&sc=258
The spiritual practices of indigenous people have existed around the globe since prehistoric times. What wisdom do they offer us in the modern world?

I asked Tom Pinkson, a psychologist in San Rafael who has studied the rituals of indigenous tribes up close for more than 30 years, to share what he has learned. Pinkson, an expert on the psychology of death and dying, is a clinical consultant to the Center for Attitudinal Healing in Sausalito, where he works with children and families with life-threatening illnesses.

Seeking deeper truths about the mysteries of life and death, Pinkson began studying with shamanic medicine teachers in the Amazon jungle, the Andes and elsewhere who initiated him into their ancient ways. He wrote a book, "The Flowers of Wiricuta," and founded WAKAN, a spiritual community based on his 11-year apprenticeship with a group of Huichol Indian shamans in the Sierra Madre of Mexico.



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You've been studying and participating in the ceremonial practices of indigenous groups since the early 1970s. What led you to that work?
My path of exploration began before my fourth birthday, when my father died and I was forcefully thrust into what the Buddhists call the "teachings of impermanence." I learned at a young age that death has the power to take away your loved ones whenever it wants.


That's a difficult lesson for anyone, let alone a four-year-old. How did you cope with that loss?

Basically, my unresolved grief imploded and I had a health crisis -- I came down with life-threatening asthma and severe allergies that required a host of weekly shots and medication. As I got older and the testosterone of adolescence hit, my pain from the loss burst forth in the form of acting-out through juvenile delinquency.

What sort of trouble did you get into?

I was in a street gang -- so I was getting into fights, destroying property, stealing cars and burglarizing homes. It was really by the grace of God that I didn't end up dead or in jail.

Eventually you got your life on track. You went to school and became a psychologist. How did you turn things around?

The forced confrontation with death as a child raised the question in my mind: Given that life can be taken away in an instant, what is worth basing a life on? That question did not have much currency with mainstream America in the 1950s.

So I began looking to other cultures for answers. I found that I identified with the black community in the South, where I was doing construction work in my late teens, and later with a Latino community in Southern California, where people still maintained connections with their indigenous roots. They had a way of relating to the world that was so much more vital than the shallow materialism and hypocrisy that I saw in the mainstream.


This connected me to life again. Having barely made it out of high school, I went to junior college and made the dean's list. I wanted to understand why I had behaved as I had and I went on to get degrees in sociology, social welfare and psychology.

Why shamanism?

After graduating from UC Berkeley in 1969, I helped start a drug program for heroin addicts in Marin County and a few years later created a new treatment program called the Wilderness Project. Part of the therapy was spending time alone in nature, a common rite of passage for adolescents in indigenous cultures.

This got me interested in finding out what other rituals indigenous cultures might have that could be useful to the people I was working with in the drug program. So I began seeking out native people in Northern California.

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Were you welcomed? How did they react to a gringo like you coming to them for advice?


The first elder I met put me through a lot of testing. He really blasted me with his anger, his sarcasm, his scorn, to see if I would stick around. This went on for quite a while.


He also gave me assignments like fasting in the wilderness for days and nights, then grilling me when I returned on what I had learned. Something in the way I responded to these challenges eventually convinced him that he could trust me, and he took me to a native healing ceremony where I met my first medicine man, who became my initial teacher on the shamanic path.

Shamanism comes out of indigenous cultures that tend to see the natural world as being conscious. To them, it's alive. How does that view fit into a spiritual perspective?

The key to living harmoniously in that world is reciprocity. We don't create the plants, the trees or the animals. They are given to us. The gods and goddesses -- the Creator, the Sacred Mystery, the Great Spirit -- give us our lives, and we must feed them back through ceremonies and rituals, so they will continue to feed us. That's how life is sustained.

And the role of the shaman in this process?


The shaman is a man or woman who has a special capacity to communicate and work with spirit. Shamans have faced their death and survived, and they have been initiated by spirit and the elders within the tribe to journey through the door into the spirit world.

How does the shaman pass through that doorway, as you put it?

There are many different ways, such as fasting, sleep deprivation, wilderness solitude, drumming, chanting and dancing for sustained periods of time -- all of which alter consciousness. Some cultures use visionary psychoactive plants, like peyote, ayahuasca and hallucinogenic mushrooms, for the same effect.

It's important to remember that shamans do their work with the aid of their spiritual helping ally, a power animal or other spiritual force that the shaman has befriended. It is not the shaman who does the real work, but the ally.

In 1981, you began working with the Huichol Indians in the mountains of northern central Mexico. They are known for maintaining shamanic traditions tracing back to the pre-Columbian era. What was that experience like?

At that point in my life I had been vision questing and working with different native elders for almost 10 years, and I was beginning to feel an internal conflict between the values of mainstream society and the ones that I was seeing in indigenous cultures, like living in harmony and balance with the Earth. The dichotomy between the two worlds was making me feel crazy.

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When a doorway opened to go be with the Huichols, I jumped through it. Walking into the center of their rancho for the first time, I saw people sitting around the fire. They were in a sacred ceremonial space, praying together and creating ritual objects to take on a pilgrimage to their holy land, which is one of the primary rites of initiation for the shamans within their culture. I immediately felt at home.


You participated in peyote ceremonies with the Huichols. What is the purpose of those rituals?


The Huichols use peyote because it helps them remember who they are, where they came from and why they are here. It is tied to their creation story.

They do a pilgrimage where the shaman leads them on an arduous journey 300 miles from their mountain homes to their holy land. On the way there, a number of initiatory experiences take place, culminating in the hunt for the peyote in Wiricuta, where the sacred medicine grows. The peyote is consumed around the fire in a ceremonial setting led by the shaman.


Eating peyote makes you sick, doesn't it?


It can make you throw up, yes. The elders say that when you eat the sacred cactus, its spirit goes inside of you and looks around. It's wondering, "Is there anything toxic in terms of guilt or shame or negative judgment about yourself? If there is, well, let's clean it out."


So the vomiting is part of the purification work, but if you stay with it, if your prayers are good and you have done the previous rituals with faith and honor, eventually you can pass through the nierica, the sacred doorway, to commune with the divine.

As a psychologist, are you concerned about the psychic danger of using a drug in this way?

It's important to recognize that the Huichols take peyote in the context of a culture that promotes social stability and cohesion. There is a whole lifestyle built around a spiritual identity, and the peyote is just one part of that.

However, there is a psychic, emotional and spiritual risk. When you open those doorways, you are not in charge of what comes through. If you have repressed or denied something, that can come up, and it's going to be amplified because of the potency of the psychoactive substance. That's why it's important to be with an elder who knows the territory. That's the shaman's work.


I'm sure you must encounter skepticism about your spending time with native medicine men and taking peyote. How do you react to people who question what you do?


Unless I'm asked, I don't usually talk about it. I'm not a salesman. Spirituality is what my life is about, and shamanic practice is what feeds my soul -- gives it power, wisdom and energy.

What is the most important message of shamanism that you think people should hear?

In order to protect and sustain a quality of life for future generations, we have to face the fact that we are in a toxic relationship with our planet. We are the only animal that shits in its own nest. And it's reaching a crisis proportion.


The shamanism of indigenous cultures offers a model for a relationship with the Earth based upon thousands of years of human exploration about how to live in harmony with the powers of creation that we are dependent upon for our very lives.

We have to learn about the sacredness of reciprocity, how to give back to the spirit of the land in equal measure for what we take. This is the essential teaching of shamanism.

What gives you hope that we will learn these lessons when, as you say, we are so far off track?

That a mainstream newspaper such as yours would make room to discuss religion and spiritual issues exploring shamanism, with someone such as myself, gives me hope. Because, ultimately, it's a spiritual crisis that we are in. The Earth is spirit manifested, and so are we. These two spirits haven't been relating to each other too well for quite some time.

Anything else give you hope?

I'm almost 61 years old now, and it never fails to thrill me when spring comes. I see the trees and the bushes that have been barren all winter. All of a sudden this new growth, this bud, starts to come out. And then the next day it's a little bigger, and eventually it opens up and this amazing flower comes out. I believe that power for regeneration -- for rebirth -- is always inherent within us.

Finding My Religion wants to hear from you. Send comments on stories and suggestions for interview subjects to miller@sfgate.com.



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During his far-flung career in journalism, Bay Area writer and editor David Ian Miller has worked as a city hall reporter, personal finance writer, cable television executive and managing editor of a technology news site. His writing credits include Salon.com, Wired News and The New York Observer.

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