THE ART OF STALKING

MEDICINE WHEEL YOGA MAT

In the first chapter of his first book, The Teachings of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 1968, Carlos Castaneda makes mention of two things which form a part of the foundation of my Initiation as a Shaman.  Carlos is told to ‘find his spot’ on don Juan’s veranda; and later, he is instructed in the Art of Stalking.  Carlos’s ‘spot’ is a certain type of Earth Energy Vortex; and Stalking is the very complicated process of figuring out what’s going on in the unfathomable world of Shamanic Spirit.

The drawing above shows my first yoga mat.  The Medicine Wheel is a time-honored device of indigenous peoples to help them organize the energies of Spirit.  It is also the basis of Mandala paintings.  By organizing around the four directions, the world of Spirit is brought into easier understanding, and rituals can be more easily organized.  This is an exercise in Stalking developed by peoples around the globe.

In today’s world, we need to develop a deeper and more profound approach to understanding the world around us.  The industrial world has lost the sense of time, ever since we invented clocks.  But Nature provides us with an incomparable teacher:  the Moon.

Since ancient Shamans had no compass or clocks, or artificial light, they used the stars and seasons and arc of the sun to keep track of what was happening around them.  As it turns out, the focus of these ancient peoples on certain aspects of the world created a condensation of the energies of consciousness around these points of focus.  This concentrated consciousness morphed into gods.  And the gods were able to communicate with their creators.  Sounds backwards?  Check it out.  You can do the same thing, when you create the Medicine Energies where you live.

One of the easiest things to focus your attentions upon is the Moon.  We are all familiar with the hackneyed concepts of Full Moon and Dark Moon, but what we see is merely a dot on our calendars.  We do not have the energetic capacities to fully grasp or discern the energy patterns of these very subtle fluxuations coming to us from the Moon.  The phrase ‘many moons’ takes on deeper meaning when we actually use the lunar cycles to organize our sense of the passage of time.

If you follow the weather reports on TV, you may notice that they are often way off just before or just after the New or Full moon.  The energies of these times are an example of  the spiritual psychology of the world we live in.  The Moon has varying moods, and these moods correspond to events occurring on the planet.  A Shaman has the sorts of powers which can cause the Moon to respond in some way.  Often, after a ceremony, a Shaman looks to the mood of the Moon to judge its success. 

The awareness necessary to discern these responses from the Moon can be developed by removing oneself from the standardized responses to the world conditioned by the culture in which we live.

In Shamanic Yoga, simply practicing yoga is one way to remove oneself  from the vibes of the world around us.  And the awareness of the nature of the human energy field which is developed while deep in asana, is one way of discerning the subtleties of these messages from the Moon.  Because it is the Shaman’s Body, which is developed from the Yoga Body, which has the antennae or receptors which can pick up the vibes from the Moon.

The world around us is a vast sea of energies.  These energies are forms of consciousness.  The consciousness which is normally contained in the ‘brain’ is not sufficient to discern the subtleties around us.  So Shamans use entheogens and psychedelics to augment their energy field perceptors.  And Shamanic Yogis develop these perceptors in their own physical energy fields.

The Art of Stalking is the art of developing the attention span (often a span of months or years) to apprehend and decipher the communications from the entities of the natural world.  Shamanic Art is often used as one means of record-keeping, as peoples develop an iconography to describe these impressions from the subtle energies.