“How do you know what to do?” - I was asked this question when talking about my upcoming Portal Journey opening 3.3. While I have an idea of the basic structure from having done this before, the road unfolds as we walk it.
“I listen to the wind and I read the stars”, I answered.
In my last Portal Journey, one of the most potent ideas we worked with was I Don’t Know. I don’t know is the fertile ground for change to come through.
Doubt is the Seed of Change
No, we don’t actually know. Our culture is built on the acquisition of knowledge - understood as one kind of knowledge, the mental/intellectual kind - and validating both our status among each other and the inflating our egos with the acquisition of such knowledge. We attach safety to having a plan, a strategy, and knowing where we are headed. I personally spent many years acquiring such knowledge until I saw how limited my life would be helmed by only this. While I still value knowledge and think it is an indispensable tool, only at the service of Knowing. I stepped into the path of my Knowing and despite having no idea where I am headed - I no longer experience clinical anxiety, whirlpools of fear, and crippling self-doubt. To help you trust your self and calm the insecurities, you can work with my Creative Juice Flower Essence.
knowledge is different than Knowing
Socrates famously said, "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." None of us know where we are headed. Even those of us who receive images of what is yet to come are only reading information that is available in the present. A prism of potential paths, potential possibilities, even potential worlds is available at each moment. Science Fiction and Fantasy love to play with this idea - the idea of universes working in parallel. One of my favorites growing up is the His Dark Materials series where children travel between such worlds.
How do we direct ourselves towards an unknown destination?
Sebene Selassie, in her book “You Belong”, introduced me to the word Epistemicide. Epistemicide, meaning, the killing of knowledge - or rather, the killing of indigenous forms of knowledge which were deeply anchored in Knowing. She spoke about this context of the Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Islands who, despite having none of the cartography technology of the White Europeans, found their way. This was called “Wayfinding”.
Here is the excerpt from her book, copied from the internet:
'Indigenous people of the Pacific Islands have a unique tradition of sailing referred to as "wayfinding." When Europeans colonised these islands, they recognised that people across thousands of miles of open ocean shared heritage. These indigenous people explained to Europeans that, yes, they traversed the thousands of miles between the islands of the South Pacific (and perhaps as far as South America). They did this on their large, open boats (think Moana) by connecting deeply to everything around them - to the elements, the animals, the sky, the ocean, and the spirit world. This seemed impossible to the European navigators and scientists. Clearly the people are primitive. How could they travel all that way without written language, maps, instruments, external navigation tools, large ships, and a Christian God? Why, we ourselves had all those things and still got lost! The Europeans settled on a theory that these natives must have accidentally drifted thousands of miles between islands (eye roll). It wasn't until the 1970's that Western disbelief was finally publicly discredited and way finders were recognised as expert sailors and navigators. But Europeans did not only not believe the way finders, they banned them from practicing their culture of way finding (though the communities secretly kept it alive). With colonisation came epistemicide....
'Epistemicide is the killing of knowledge. It refers to the wiping out of ancient ways of knowing. There was a rationalist/scientific paradigm within European Enlightenment that spread from the hard sciences to the social sciences and into the humanities. This worldview rendered nonscientific knowledge systems invalid. I believe epistemicide is a primary reason we as moderns have lost our sense of belonging...
I remember reading this and the pieces clicking in place. Not only were indigenous forms of knowledge actively banned, they were suppressed with violence. To practice Wayfinding - or any ways of connecting to the world that was not in the colonizer’s small mental box of a rubric - was to endanger oneself and one’s people. This legacy of fear lives on, viscerally so in the ancestral DNA of those whose people had to sweep their knowledge under the rug, etherically so our collective psyche, palpable to everyone.
But this knowledge was not lost. There were those who worked to protect it, to keep the sacred fire alive until it was safe enough to be stoked again. They are and have been speaking in many places, if only we can tune in to listen.
We must all return to Wayfinding, which means first stepping into the primordial soup of I Don’t Know, from which new life - new forms that are intrinsically connected to All Things - can emerge. As a being inhabiting the White Psyche, I see how the fear of the unknown - the I Must Know - upholds the systems of power that hurt us all. I believe that in learning to Wayfind we can release these systems - within and without.
This metaphor of Wayfinding is indeed Indigenous, and every person has ancestry that is Indigenous to some place, which means that every person has a broken bridge to relational forms of knowlege/Knowing that can be internally repaired. Certainly, we must give voice to the voices that were silenced. Certainly, we must let those who were asked to follow, lead. Certainly, we have the gift of knowledge-Knowing preserved - if we are able to move beyond our own colonized limitations and accept their validity as truth-bearers.
Everyone’s Way is different, and our job is to find our own. In FlowForm Repatterning, I help you remove the survival systems that create a false sense of safety, while actually cutting off the own inner Knowing. These systems are colonized systems; re-patterning them is a radical proposition.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book, “Braiding Sweetgrass”, talks about ‘becoming indigenous’ - which she defines as re-learning to be in co-creative relationships with the earth. From reading the patterns across these voices mentioned here - and others - in addition to the ones that speak to me directly,
I offer some keywords for the Art of Wayfinding:
Co-creation: being a partner with the Universe and other forms of consciousness
Relationship/ relational: working together
Circle: the structure of non-hierarchical co-creation
Gifts offered and Gifts received: a culture of reciprocity
Connection to the world around: via the elements
Sensitivity: taking in subtle information
Seeing oneself as part of an intelligent, conscious ecosystem
Seeing one’s role as a small part in a larger story, with the aide of a Greater Power than oneself - while also having a clear and defined role that only you can play
The Instinctual and Feeling bodies: relating to the world as a whole human being, through the senses and emotions
These are small arrows for you to follow, each one is a deep well from which to drink. I will be sending more newsletters on how I specifically have learned to way find, in case my path may illuminate something in yours.
In the upcoming Portal Journey, starting next weekend, I will be teaching the Art of Wayfinding by sharing knowledge I have learned from these and other sources, and most importantly - helping my companions tune into their own inner compass, where their own Knowing resides.
If you are called to Find your Way, apply to the Portal Journey. You’re always welcome for a Quick Natter to discuss any of this and what it brings up for you with me,
xxxx
Saga
Reading your words I’m reminded of this poetic fragment from Wendell Berry, Our Real Work:
It may be that when we no longer know which way to go,
We have come to our real work.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed,
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
💙