Blog o’ Gnosis

Several years ago I caught a segment of some TV documentary about Central American shamans. I only remember one scene, but it made a big impression on me. It was in the hut of a curandera who was doing a distance healing on someone. She went to her altar, chanted something, spoke some words, and lit a candle for the person. Then she left.

That was it. There was no checking back after five minutes to see how the candle was burning, no worrying whether she’d contacted the right spirits, no concern that maybe the ritual wasn’t going to work. She just went about the rest of her day seemingly unconcerned about both the process and the outcome. The level of trust she had was amazing to me. Oh, and incidentally, the healing worked.

Of course, seeing someone in a 5-minute film clip is no way to get an accurate reading of who they are or what they do. I did not know this woman or for that matter anyone else in her village or her entire culture. Therefore, I was free to project anything onto her healing ritual that I wanted. Knowing that I was using her as a hitching post for my own ideas on power and authenticity didn’t make the experience any less moving for me.

This chance encounter came at a time when I was questioning everything about ritual and magic that I had been taught. I was trying to come to a personal gnosis about what the essentials of ritual were, hacking away at any form that I could not justify with a felt sense of how it aided my intention. Seeing someone so plainly confident of who she was and what she was doing made me realize just how far away my own attainment of that state was. But it also convinced me that I was on the right search.

Now, several years later, I still feel like I am in the middle of that process of change and discovery. The difference is that the questioning attitude which was so helpful to me in the beginning has now become an impediment. There is a point at which you are fairly certain that you know what works. At that point, you just need to trust what you know and let it work. But the habits of self-doubt die hard, so I have been locked in another struggle lately: how to cultivate trust, which feels a lot like simply not caring. After lighting that candle, can I let it go out of my mind completely and turn to something else?

Fortunately, I have the advantage of cross-training to help me out. I practice aikido, which is a singularly helpful pursuit for anyone trying to embody magical principles. We were doing sword strikes one day, which like most basic moves in aikido are seemingly quite simple. You grip the wooden sword (bokken) just so, raise it above your head, and bring it down fast. But within that framework lie myriad complexities that make even masters of the art perpetual students. That day my focus was on making the sword cut as straight as I could. My teacher David Keip came over to me and said, “Looks good, Anne. But don’t try to control the sword on the way down, just let it fall.”

It was one of those moments when you hear something that you’ve probably heard hundreds of times before, but somehow it sinks in for the first time. Just let the sword fall. All that preparation of focusing my energy on the strike, getting the sword in the right position, feeling the alignment of intention and power—all that is just preparation for trusting the sword and letting the strike go free.

Needless to say, “let the sword fall” is a principle that is finding its way into every aspect of my life right now. Walking my dog is a meditation on each leg kicking forward freely before landing on the ground. Every conversation is a study of how my thoughts are gathered and then expressed. “Cut to the chase” has taken on bold new meanings, and anyone who might have thought me blunt before will be surprised at how much better at it I have become. Thank goodness that aikido is also a non-violent art!

So, back to the candle. Preparing for a strike and then letting it go is a very good way for me to conceptualize doing any kind of magic. It gives me a kinesthetic sense of the largely mental process of asking the spirits to manifest something. And it has helped me understand that there is a middle ground between worrying and controlling something on the one hand, and ignoring it on the other.

In aikido, even though I am not controlling the sword as it falls I am still responsible for where it lands. To turn away in mid-strike could be fatal. Likewise, trusting the candle to do its work while I leave it alone does not mean I am not paying attention on some level. I have an awareness of the work in progress, but that connection comes from my center, not my head. It feels like listening to the energy, instead of tinkering with it or tuning it out.

For me, the synthesis of aikido and magical practice has huge potential. It helps me resolve some of the ethical dilemmas I have with magic, and increases the potency of any acts I choose to do. It is a challenge to distill these principles and articulate them in a way that makes sense to non-martial artists, so I hope this blog post wasn’t too obscure or difficult to read. Because I am actively trying to figure out how to teach this stuff in ways that don’t involve making people fall down, I will probably write more about it in the future. Hopefully this is good news to at least some people out there. For those of you who are groaning at the thought, one tip from my years of training might come in handy: a dose of ibuprofen before reading, followed by another dose afterwards, should blunt any pain or swelling. And tomorrow you’ll feel good as new!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Ritual, Spirit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.