There was a new moon on the first day of a new year.
We lit a fire.We set intentions, scrawling them secretly, folding them carefully into small squares of paper in the middle of an elaborate arrangement of flowers and candies and grains and seeds and sugar and wine.The bundle burned slowly, the temperature low, the wood still faintly damp.
We chatted and waited and watched. Shifted away from the smoke and watched some more.A log fell suddenly, burnt through by now, and with the moving heat the flame rose fierce around the bundle, encompassing it quickly now, then fluttered small until there was almost nothing but the coals glowing hot still. Weekly Photo Challenge – Beginning
For several nights now I’ve dreamt of a temple of death.
Apropos for the Halloween / Day of the Dead season I suppose – the skulls and skeletons are everywhere, sticking up out of the ground, in and around a kind of pyramid rising up into a darkened sky with segmented sections, the lower levels somewhat gorier and grisly, the staircase up to the upper level flanked with lithe dancing young people.
The dreams seem sort of natural for the season, or like maybe they’re a by-product of the new moon / eclipse action happening in the sky, but I also suspect they’ve been brought on by this breathing exercise thingy I’ve been doing.
The exercise is an extended 5-month project, 40 minutes a day of combined breathing and visualizations, taught or guided by Sergio Magaña of Mexico City. He has a school in Mexico for teaching spiritual mastery and healing techniques of the ancient Toltec and Mexicas, or Aztec as we would call them.
Here’s some music to set the tone (the video has Maya imagery, but gives that ancient Mexico feeling) –
This guy Sergio has a book out, and someone on the book jacket blurb calls him “the new Carlos Castaneda”, really a most unfortunate and misleading reference because for one, his writing is not the lush fiction of Castaneda, but a more impenetrably cryptic mathematical and culturally localized explanation of things that made no sense to me until I went to a workshop he gave a couple of months ago in Owen Sound.
Secondly, there is no sign of a creepy Castaneda cult around him – he is a funny, laid back, lovely, helpful guy, and works with the UNESCO Heritage Club to preserve the Nahuatl culture.
Nonetheless, at the workshop in Owen Sound I found I was having some serious resistance – doubts or hesitations or reservations about being open to a teacher, a healer from outside my own cultural tradition. Maybe it was because I hadn’t dreamt about him before he appeared – something that has happened to me more than once, where I’ve dreamt of a wise person, then met them later, a phenomena which made me trust the wisdom, the prescience of the dream to have led me to them.
With Sergio there was also a question for me of cultural appropriateness – I worry over the kind of mix & match version of spiritual grab-baggery that seems to plague New Age type ventures. Even though I am fascinated by all things Mexican, have spent a lot of time there, still I hesitated.
I kind of wanted to ask him directly about these questions, about why we Anglo-Saxon types should feel free to saunter into the study of ancient Mexican culture, but I felt awkward and maybe like an insensitive brute, cause in the back of my mind was also the thought that it seemed a bit bizarre to be learning spirituality from the tradition of the Aztecs? I mean heck, those guys were INTENSE!
But I waited, didn’t raise any questions, just learned what I could, and then back at home one night reading, I stumbled on these words:
…if you go back far enough you can probably find that all our ancestors practiced human sacrifice. It was part of the religion in the old days and seems like it was practiced all around the world…” ~J.M. White
Right. Of course. Abraham and Isaac. Not quite the same scale but yes, the idea being that human moral codes are constantly shifting.
And the joke I always remember of how they say the Aztecs and the Spaniards deserved each other in terms of their mutual capacities for cruelty.
So being charmed by his lovely personality and the remarkable amount of success he’s had with his practices, and because it’s free and I find myself totally unable to stick with traditional meditation, I committed myself to the 5-month project of Sergio’s breathing exercises. And things are definitely starting to shift internally – some seismic cracks that have left me without much impulse to write.
The fundamental point of this breathing exercise is to “cleanse the shadow”, or in Western psychological terms, clear the unconscious.
It’s a technique that proposes to bypass all talking cures and do away entirely with the “story” of the self.
The idea is to let go of all the elements of what we tell ourselves about who we are.
The challenge lies in understanding and accepting that human beings are simply an idea, an illusion in motion, and that the only truth is the energy of the essence, which is pure potential. As long as we are aware that this is the case, then our idea of ourselves can easily be replaced by a better idea. ~ Sergio Magaña
The more weeks and now months that pass of doing this exercise for 40 minutes a day, the more I seem to be dreaming of death.
But later, as I get towards the end of it, I wonder what new imagery might wait for me there?
Biking home late from work, a route different from my usual as I’d stopped to pick up another drawing pad, some conté, a few more colours of paint, and launching off with bags dangling from the handlebars I saw a man I used to know.
Oh, it was a complicated story, an early education in some of the crueler ways of men, the contradictions a man can have, being not at all a good man and yet not quite evil – in other words, definite trouble.
But we are still friends, friends from a distance, so we embrace, each leaning towards the other with bikes balanced underneath, he holding the cell phone aloft momentarily, Dejame saludar, he says to the person on the other end.
To me he says, Call me, Write me, Let’s get together, and I grin and nod, knowing I never will, that I see him now as a symbolic figure in my world who appears out of the blue like a highly personalised superstition. Years ago I nicknamed him Eleggua – trickster, guardian of pathways. When he appears like this, mercurial, on a street corner, it strikes me like a message, an apparition, a reminder to look for crossroads, choices, pathways that may show up leading in different directions.
Pushing off into the evening, I wonder about his appearance, put on alert for what may lie ahead.
Rounding the corner on my bike from College heading up Manning, my attention is caught by a woman’s laugh.
She is a young woman – I see her pulling herself up from where she is leaning over with the force of the laugh at a small table outside Greg’s Ice Cream. And so…, she says, prompting the young man at the table with her to continue with his story, the story that has made her laugh so.
He has a baseball cap sitting smartly on his head, and something about the cap and his very upright eager posture suggests an earnestness, a sincerity, an openness, an undefiled quality.
And I feel their young courtship, such a pure feeling as I imagine it, because of the full-bodied way in which she let herself laugh in the summer night, giving herself over to his story, and because of the way he sits so fastidious and attentive to her. Coming from the chance meeting with the tricky, mercurial Eleggua, I allow their fresh, young, sweet spirits to wash over me in the night, and carry the feeling home with me, wondering what is next on the path.
There was a new moon on the first day of a new year.
We set intentions, scrawling them secretly, folding them carefully into small squares of paper in the middle of an elaborate arrangement of flowers and candies and grains and seeds and sugar and wine.
The bundle burned slowly, the temperature low, the wood still faintly damp.
A log fell suddenly, burnt through by now, and with the moving heat the flame rose fierce around the bundle, encompassing it quickly now, then fluttered small until there was almost nothing but the coals glowing hot still. 
Weekly Photo Challenge – Beginning
follow your nose 