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by John P. Milton, August 22, 1991
For nearly half the year, my home is in a remote mountain range in Southern Colorado. The small wood-plank cabin I live in has no plumbing, electricity or telephone. The stream cascading next to me is my kitchen, bathtub and concert hall. Surrounding the little camp is an extraordinary display of Nature: tall cliffs, high peaks, waterfalls, undulating alluvial fans and forests reflecting all shades of green, gray and brown.
And then there are the stones. Circling and spiraling across my home ecosystem are millions of remarkable, complex conglomerate stones reflecting all the colors of the rainbow. Many of these form seats for meditation and healing that had been used by ancient people for thousands of years. After twelve years of living with these stones, they have taught me at least a few of their secrets. Such deep inner sharings should not be put to paper, however; they must be experienced directly with a simple, open and loving heart.
I am fortunate in being able to work and live in close daily connection with Nature. My particular good fortune is in being able to work as a guide for helping bring people back into contact with both inner and outer Nature. For several weeks each month, people come to my home area; together we do a meditation, heart-opening and natural movement intensive, followed by a seven day wilderness solo. After the solo, we come back together to share, celebrate and explore ways to carry the insight, open-heartedness and wisdom we have received back into our everyday lives.
One of the most moving realizations I have had in doing regular wilderness solos (vision quests) for others and myself over the past forty years, is of the profound healing power of Nature. This healing power comes directly and naturally, without any artifice or complicated treatments, prayers, rituals or ceremonies. All that is required is a commitment to come alone to Nature's heart, to relax into the silence, and to trust. In living closely and alone with Nature for the first time, most people's initial experiences are of radical slowing down.......and of silence. Both are powerful healers. Modern technocratic culture is characterized by ever-increasing pressures for speed, and by almost continuous noise - inner and outer. In our contemporary cultural frenzy to boost our economies, we produce increasingly processed products; we consume increasingly greater quantities of these goods and energy, hoping to fill the gnawing void within we fear to meet. As we feed this growing industrial/technocratic mesh, our natural world is systematically replaced by an artificial one. And in this artificial world, the values of silence and slow, organic rhythms are rarely encountered.
Consider how many millions of years it has taken for our current interconnected web of body, mind and emotions to evolve. And consider what kind of environment supported this evolution, and co-evolved with us. The environments were natural ones, where organic rhythms of day/night, moon cycle, solar cycle, constellation cycles were part of us; and we were part of them. Trees, flowers, streams, lakes, ocean shorelines, mountains, rocks, sky, clouds - all of these elements of Nature have been companions in our journey into our contemporary embodiment, and influenced our growth. Now, in a few generations, we have leapt into incredibly new processed environments. Plastics, millions of new chemical compounds, air-conditioned air, fluorescent lighting, artificial food, powerful drugs, glass/steel/plastic housing and transportation units, alien electromagnetic fields, intense performance stress, speed, environmental pollution of every imaginable kind, breakdown of community/extended family/core family/ marriage/children and parent relationships - the list can go on and on. But it is characterized by one thing: the sudden shift from natural, organic, whole, mostly rural environments within which human beingness evolved - to highly artificial, speedy, noisy, crowded and polluted urban centers. No wonder the species is in trouble.
When we drop all our artificial lifestyles, and move back into Nature with simple, open hearts, Nature heals us. Healing happens even if we can only return for a short while. And the healing comes naturally through simple reconnection with the countless ancient relationships our species has always had with all the other living things, with Mother Earth, and with the cyclical energies of the Heavens. Our minds, bodies and hearts move into their ancient harmonies. Time slows into the way the moon fills the night, the way the eagle circles in the sky.
Should we need to purify or receive empowerment, all of Nature's elements can work with us. Simply sitting along the banks of a mountain stream, one can feel the mountain chi (life force) carried by the stream flow through us; as it flows through, it cleanses our bioenergy and brings fresh sources of vital energy to flow through our meridians. There is a basic principle of working with Nature's chi: where the mind goes, the chi follows. Using this principle, we can gently guide this natural energy to cleanse and energize us, storing the fresh chi in our "tan-tien," the great reservoir of life force located just below the navel.
In the same way, we can guide and exchange the healing energies of sun and moon, tree, stone, and mother earth herself. However, in doing this, it is important that we always ask permission of the beings we work with first. And after we are through, we must be sure to radiate back our love and appreciation to those beings who agree to share healing chi with us.
In the early 1980's, a woman in her thirties arrived unannounced at my Southern Colorado cabin home. She explained that she had an incurable, rapid degeneration of most of her major organ systems. In doing healing energy work with her, one experienced something akin to a human "black hole" or negative energy vortex. No matter how much positive energy was passed through to her, her bioenergetic field called for more and more. All her doctors had given up on healing her strange, undiagnosable organ breakdown. The most optimistic among them only gave her three months to live.
I set her up in a small retreat hut near the beautiful creek that runs out of the mountains here. She remained largely in solitude, except for a rare trip to town or a brief healing session with myself and a good friend who was also staying on the land. Most of her time was spent in deep communion with Nature, or in doing her Tibetan Buddhist practices. After three months she was still alive; after five months she was completely healed and continues in good health today.
In rather dramatic form, this story illustrates the incredible healing power of living in close contact with Nature......... particularly when combined with the effects of natural healing practices and deep spiritual cultivation.
As mentioned earlier in this article, Nature's energy (chi) can and will naturally purify, heal and empower us, if we only remain open to her with a loving heart/mind. However, we must remain alert to the many, and often subtle, ways we have separated ourselves from Nature. For example, in most earth-connected societies, people traditionally walk barefoot, or with leather or natural fiber sandals, moccasins and shoes. Such peoples walk a great deal.
During the ten years I worked and lived largely in the Himalayas, I was amazed at the extensive walking both women and men did each day. Long treks of many miles, up and down two to five thousand feet each way, were common to collect fuelwood, to trade, to tend to agricultural fields and to care for livestock. All this walking not only benefited them with abundant outdoor exercise and regular, intimate contact with wild Nature in the surrounding Himalayas, but it also literally grounded them deeply in Mother Earth. They walked and moved differently than most people of our culture. Their minds and hearts were connected to their feet. They were not just floating, disconnected awareness's confined to their heads. Also, by wearing natural fiber and leather footwear (or simply walking barefoot), the chi of the earth was able to pass easily into the feet and constantly nurture them at each step. Compare this to our culture, where this most fundamental connection with Mother Earth is broken by almost all of us. We encase the soles of our feet in the powerful insulator rubber; and in so doing, we cut ourselves off even further from the deep healing power of Nature.
As Westerners, most of us have much work to do to unlearn our blocked and unnatural ways of walking with the Earth. Our physical bodies are the aspects of Nature closest to us; if we can learn to become more fully embodied and grounded, we will have taken the first giant step toward becoming more deeply connected to all of Nature. When we gather to do the Passage training, before going out on the seven day solo portion of Sacred Passage, we focus on learning how to "stalkwalk," and to accomplish "GaiaFlow" movement. This means learning how to flow through Nature as an interconnected part of it; moving now like a mountain lion, then as a great peaceful river. In all cases, we learn how to move so that each step is a kiss or caress of Mother Earth. In this way the healing energy of Mother Earth flows through us naturally. In this way the profound interconnectedness of the individual and Nature begins to arise spontaneously. At this point, we may even glimpse the path into a Greater Nature that lies beyond connectedness of inner and outer. As the great Taoist Master Chuang Tsu wrote in the fourth century B.C.:
"Do not seek fame. Do not make plans. Do not be absorbed by activities. Do not think that you know. Be aware of all that is and dwell in the infinite. Wander where there is no path. Be all that heaven gave you, but act as though you have received nothing. Be empty, that is all. The mind of a perfect man is like a mirror. It grasps nothing. It expects nothing. It reflects but does not hold. Therefore, the perfect man can act without effort."
- from "Chuang Tsu; Inner Chapters," A new translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, Vintage Books, N.Y., 1974. pp:159
Mr. Milton has been conducting vision quests and wilderness solos for himself and others for the past 40 years. He was first introduced to the Sacred View at an early age by his human Grandfather. Mother Earth and Great Spirit have continued to be his main teachers, predominantly through the one or two annual visions quests he has done since 1952. Many of these quests have been done while on expedition in extremely remote areas of the Arctic, the Tropical Rain Forest and Himalayan Mountains. He has also been trained in many Earth-centered traditions since the late 1950's, including Taoism, Chi Kung and T'ai Chi; Buddhist meditation; the Native American Way; Hindu Tantra; and the great mystical traditions of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs. But despite all this, he still doesn't know much.
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