The Wind is My Mother
Posted on Mar 26th, 2008
by 
Innish
Innish
I've been greatly enjoying this book by Bear Heart. It is subtitled: The Life and Teachings of a Native American Shaman, which is kinda funny as he actually groups shamans with sorcerers and even eschews the name "medicine man". His feeling is that the medicine actually comes through him from the Creator; he is only the conduit. He is a person who gives medicine.
Bear Heart with Feather
Bear Heart is a Muskogee Creek, from both the Bear Clan and the Wind Clan. Born in 1918, he was trained in the old ways of medicine by two elders, and then went on to college to study Psychology. His story is fascinating and his method of storytelling is reserved and so unlike any popular modern spiritual book now in print, that I find myself continually appreciative for the resounding dose of love and experience he shares in his matter-of-fact way.
This book is not about the law of attraction, but there is one part in the chapter on Walking in Balance where he touches on it and it might work well to contrast his thoughts with the current gurus. He begins with a paragraph on how we are capable of making ourselves well by our thinking , but we have become dependent on going to a doctor and paying money to be told what is wrong with us. He continues:
Still, you haven't really been cured--internal problems cannot usually be handled by external means. The cure was already within you, but we've never been taught that we can handle most of our own problems.
People often ask for my advice and counseling, but overall, the best advice I can give to anyone at any time is: Never complete a negative statement. You might start out thinking it, but don't complete it because you're about to enter it into the computer up in your head and it could come true.
Your "subconscious" responds to whatever you put into your conscious awareness. When you put information into a computer, it responds to that information and you see it on the screen. Similarly, there's a crew of workers within you--sub-personalities, or whatever you want to call them--who are going to see to it that whatever you put into your conscious awareness comes out that way. So if you put in something negative, it's going to come out negative. When a captain on a boat gives a command, the crew below doesn't argue with the captain. They don't say it's right, wrong, moral, or immoral; they just respond to what they're told. What you feed your subconscious can transfer not only into your attitude and your thinking, but your body, in time, will feel the brunt of it. Particularly if it's heavy duty stuff.
We attract. The situation that you are most afraid of you are going to attract. Some fear is healthy because it makes you cautious. But when you're overly afraid of something, you're going to attract that very thing.
Nary a mention of wealth or abundance.
There's another section that I like where he describes one of the lessons that his teacher gave him. He fasted for three days and then on the morning of the fourth, his teacher brought him to a tree at the top of a hill. He instructed Bear Heart to wrap his arms and legs around the tree and then he left. (Bear Heart cracked a joke to himself saying that if anyone asked him if the tree talked to him, he'd say that it barked.)
He understood what the teacher was trying to do: work through pride, ego, and self-importance.
I began to see that, when it comes right down to it, we are nothing until that nothing becomes so dedicated that it is like a vessel through which the good things can move, an instrument for receiving knowledge and sharing it with others who might be in need.
After he accepted this surrender, he received a communication from the tree that told him that the only thing he knew is what he experienced; everything else was hearsay. This brought up this insight:
Never claim to know anything until you have experienced it yourself.
Well, this book is a knowing, because it is an experience to read. Of course, that, too, is hearsay, so I recommend that you experience it yourself.
Enjoy!
Access: Public
medicine
July 2008