Swimming with Elephants

by Sarah Bamford Seidelmann

  After one particularly difficult week, feeling thwarted and throttled by life, I realized that I desperately needed a retreat. Intrigued by Mark's vision quest—which, in the long term, seemed to have a positive effect on him—I devised a brief vision quest of my own at a hotel conveniently nearby. Doing a quest in the wild seemed too complicated. I didn't have time for six weeks in a yurt; school was about to start. An overnight would have to do. Besides, I got the weekend rate.

  Mark was happy to cover the home base. As fasting seemed classic for a vision quest, I skipped breakfast that morning. Like other forms of deprivation, fasting is supposed to have the effect of helping you connect more deeply with the Divine. Who knows? I made it up as I went along.

  I left home early Saturday morning, checked in at a flashy, recently refurbished hotel, and headed up to my room. Despite the lobby's polished appearance, however, as the elevator doors slid open, I saw that the upper floors felt tired. I was longing for beauty—the kind I knew I'd find in Nature. Could I find it here?

  My room, like the hallway, didn't feel pristine or sacred to me at all. I carefully lit some cedar incense with the intention of clearing out the room's mustiness and inviting love and light to enter. I set up a small altar and rolled out my vintage sari quilt on the floor. Then I lay down, preparing to take a journey. That's when I noticed the artwork on the wall. It was an architectural rendering of the Taj Mahal. Most hotels in northern Minnesota are adorned with images of rugged Canadian Mounties encountering bears. The Taj? I did a double take.

  I'm not sure what image could have been hanging there that could have made me feel more loved—or more divinely supported. It was as if the spirits were telling me that they were present, even in this remodeled, less-than-perfect, 1970s hotel room in Duluth.

  I'd just recently gotten the thrilling news that a visit to the Taj Mahal had been added to the itinerary of the Khumb Mela pilgrimage. The Taj Mahal was a place I had been shown again and again on my visits with Alice to the Upper World. Though I generally crave speed and getting things done in a flash, my encounters with this structure in the spirit world had taught me that things worth creating take time, love, and a big dose of patience. After all, the magnificent monument had taken twenty-two years and an unfathomable amount physical force and power to complete.

  Moreover, the building's purpose was a powerful one. It had been commissioned by the grief-stricken Shah Jahan in memory of his wife, who had died in childbirth. The Shah dreamed that those who entered the Taj Mahal would experience love and cosmic pardoning. His daunting project would take most of the rest of his life to complete. When I'm working on projects that take a lifetime—parenting my kids, building my marriage, being a friend and daughter—I try to remember the burnt naan bread, the exhausted people and elephants, and the long journey to completion of the Taj Mahal. And I remember that love was the reason it was all envisioned in the first place.

  As I lay down on the hotel room floor and journeyed beneath the symbolic image of the Taj, I realized that what I really longed to do, more than a vision quest, was to complete the book I'd been working on. When I first started writing it, I was afraid to share some of my more personal stories, so I consulted Alice, asking her if my writing would serve others. How could I be sure that the words I wrote would not be misunderstood or, worse yet, cause injury?

  In response to these concerns, Alice had taken me on a free fall into a pitch-black abyss. At first, this plunge scared the hell out of me. But then I looked to my side, and I saw and felt Alice falling alongside me, doing flips and twirls and laughing at me in a kindly way, letting me know that it was okay to let go. It was, after all, a free fall, and I couldn't know the outcome ahead of time. It was a risk, she was telling me. Enjoy! Gently, Alice informed me that I needed to learn to become comfortable with and even relish the experience of not knowing the outcome.

  And I learned that I couldn't write when I was hungry. So I quickly decided to break my four-hour fast by ordering from room service and got to work putting the finishing touches on my second book. Starving myself had never been my strong suit.

  CHAPTER 25

  Saint Teresa

  Union is as if in a room there were two large windows through which the light streamed in. It enters in different places, but it all becomes one.

  Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle

  The three-year program at the Foundation for Shamanic Studies gave me a solid footing for my healing work. I'd recently run across an intriguing book cover with Teresa of Ávila, the Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint; the cover implied she was a poster girl for those of us who were born to freak. Despite naysayers and critics, she followed the strange and mystical path that was placed before her. Intrigued by this book cover and in search of inspiration, I endeavored to learn more from her directly by journeying to ask her spirit if I could merge with it. I wanted to learn more about her life.

  The drumming begins, and I set my intention. Suddenly, I am standing in the back hall of a church alongside Teresa. She agrees to merge with me, and her body drifts into mine. My facial muscles become very tingly and contracted during the merging, as if my face is trying to rearrange itself to become Teresa's.

  Wearing all white, I head down an old stone-floored hallway. I experience many things while in Teresa's body—the exhaustion of traveling in a horse-drawn carriage at night, moving from town to town. In the churches along the way, I kneel down in front of the altar and plead for Jesus to merge with me. As he does, I felt an intense ecstasy—pleasure almost to the point of pain. It is like being aroused at the level of the soul—an erotic, sensual, pleasure sensation—ecstasy. Afterward, I touch the sick or I fall down onto the floor of the church and allow people to touch me. As I move from church to church, the crowds grow larger.

  I see great squalor and suffering, crying children, and very ill and dispirited-looking people who follow the carriage along the roads. I am exhausted but also in love with my work and my passionate connection to Christ. It is a miraculous marriage of sorts.

  I feel a great joy in this merging and falling down and letting healing take place through my (her) body, which I get to know on a cellular level. I feel I can keep going, and I never feel alone. People speak ill of me, especially some of the powerful men of the Catholic Church. At night, when I sleep, my sweet surrender to this relationship of spirit with Christ is palpable.

  Then the drum calls us back. This incredible experience is doubly strange as I have never felt a closeness with Jesus, despite being raised an Episcopalian. I don't have a distinct sense of who Jesus really was as an individual but instead feel the power of his spirit when I merge with him.

  In the months that followed this encounter with Teresa, I enjoyed a deeper intimacy with my helping spirits. These sweet feelings settled on me at night as I lay in bed just before falling asleep. They were often stronger when I was particularly disheartened.

  I found great pleasure in Teresa's exhausting life. I knew that I would never be a saint, but this generous experience showed me that living a life devoted to the spirits—Jesus in Teresa's case; Alice and others in mine—was a beautiful, deeply satisfying, and worthy life to lead.

  Many other unexpected encounters with spirit followed this one. One of them was particularly unpleasant. But, by now, I'd become aware that even terrifying encounters, like mine with the black mamba, could have great significance. My job was to pay attention.

  It wasn't just journeys alone that were teaching me. There were dreams as well. I awoke at 3:00 in the morning from one awful dream in which I was dying. It was vivid and gravely real. Metastatic melanoma had been found in several places in my body. I was lying in a hospital bed shrouded in layers and layers of gauze and blankets, with tubes all over me. I was barely recognizable.

  In the dream, I was totally resigned to death. Charged with the responsibility to call my friends and tell them, I felt horribly overwhelmed. Worse yet, I had the feeling that I wasn't prepared to face th
e bardos of death—those intermediate states of consciousness between lives that the Buddha described—so that I could leave the earth. Great, I thought. I am dying, and I can't even get that right.

  I understood, while in the dream, that there was one thing I had to do: I had to love Mark without reservation. I was also told (or more accurately, I heard) this warning: Anger causes disease. If I wanted to live a long life, to prevent this dream from becoming a reality, I had to love Mark in an unlimited way, and I had to meditate in order to prepare myself for death when it did come. The dream wasn't entirely horrible, however; in it, I was also able to feel the deep grief of my dear friends at the news that I was dying. I was more loved than I ever could have imagined.

  When I woke up, I felt flooded with immense love and compassion for Mark. Just before going to bed the previous night, he'd been grousing about his sleep-apnea equipment. I was weary of him complaining about it. After the dream, I suddenly saw him in a completely new way. I was aghast at my response to his anguish. Tears sprang to my eyes and I looked over at him sleeping. I couldn't wait for him to wake up so I could tell him how much I loved him.

  I crept quietly out of bed and headed into the living room down the hall to spend time writing out the dream. I immediately recognized that it was an awful lot like Ebeneezer Scrooge's dream in Dickens's A Christmas Carol. While it was uncomfortable thinking that I might be as bad off as Scrooge, I was grateful. I was being given a view of my own future, which might be dim unless I could “love Mark without reservation.” As terrifying as the dream was, it was also clear to me that it was a gift from the spirits.

  At 5:00 that morning, I heard Mark stirring to his alarm in the next room, and I immediately went to him and shared the dream and confessed: “I'm so sorry. I've been insensitive about your breathing. Please forgive me. I love you, and I'm going to love you in a better way.” We hugged and tears streamed down my face. I felt Mark melting into my body, and there was an immense gentleness permeating the room, the house—the neighborhood. I was grateful for this literal wake-up call.

  The more deeply I plunged into my work with the spirits, the more I realized that it was time to really let my medical career go. I sensed I needed some help with that, so I had a healing performed for me by a shamanic healer named Kris Thoeni. After the healing, she encouraged me to create a ceremony to empower my intention. To prepare, I carefully constructed a little coffin representing my career in medicine. I used an old cracker box as the base and strapped on an outdated hospital ID badge and a printout of several work-related emails—the kind I'd prefer never to see again. I covered it all in a tangled bit of black string that looked like a spider's web, to represent all the ways my medical career continued to entangle me.

  I also spent some time thinking about the many gifts my medical career had given me—the privilege of doing years of challenging work that I loved, the gift of courage to trust my diagnostic skills, the fellowship of many brilliant and fun colleagues who were committed to doing great things for others, and (of course!) the sheer adventure of it all.

  When I told him my plans for a ceremony, Mark sensed how important this process was for me and offered to join in. I was relieved to have a witness. Together, we opened sacred space in our backyard fire pit, as we had learned to do many workshops ago. I silently reviewed my intention to release my medical career fully, blew my intention into the cracker box, and placed the little coffin into the lively flames.

  As the fire began to consume my cracker-box coffin, a very unexpected and miraculous thing happened. A beautiful ashen peony with a multitude of soft, fluttering petals bloomed up out of the blazing coffin's lid. Peonies are my favorite flower. They represent beauty, the ten-thousand-petalled nature of the soul, great abundance, and ease. Even Alice, my elephant guide, wears garlands of peonies around her neck. This ashen peony rising out of the flames was as strong a sign as I could imagine: This new path will be blessed.

  As often happens when you do shamanic work with intention, a few weeks later, things literally start moving in “ordinary reality.” The chief of my department at the hospital called to say that they were no longer sure they could continue to renew my hospital credentials unless I worked more frequently. I'd only worked a handful of days in the past two years. Momentarily, my ego wanted to protest. How dare they imply that my diagnostic skills could fade so quickly! But the part of me that was fighting was becoming quieter and quieter. He told me that he wanted to bring the issue up at the next staff meeting and asked if I wanted to be there for the discussion. I heard myself say to him, all calm and adultlike: “I'm okay with whatever the group decides.” And I really was.

  After letting go in the fire ceremony, I suddenly recalled what my shamanic teacher, Alicia, a fierce and wonderfully made human, said about becoming a healer. She's a slender and powerful woman originally from Mexico, with fiery eyes and the loveliest way of expressing herself. “I hafff deeecided to coh-mmeeet my life to theeees work. Theees work is [pause] my [pause] life,” she told us. She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows as she looked out and into each of us and paused for a long time. In a way, it was a throw down. Alicia's words swirled in my head for weeks afterward and struck a chord deep inside me. Could I commit to this work for life?

  I was putting everything I had into a new boat and leaving the known shore of medicine. This felt both charming and a bit sketchy, like Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki raft made of reeds—organic, soulful, and beautiful but perhaps not entirely seaworthy. I was seeking safe passage and a blessing—maybe even a miracle—to be able to serve as a healer.

  Later that year, I took some time at the river near my house to do a second impromptu water ceremony on my own. I blew my intention into a small offering boat I'd made of wildflowers and birch bark and placed it into the current. With the slow-running summertime river, the singing birds, and the bees lazing in the thimbleberry blossoms as my witnesses, I silently made this commitment: I dedicate my life to doing this work. I commit myself to listening to the spirits and to being a conduit for help and healing.

  All the confusion and dust around my life became a prayer to the spirits:

  Make me useful.

  Allow me to serve in the greatest capacity I can.

  You know me.

  Give me all I can handle.

  Point the way.

  CHAPTER 26

  Into the Shadows

  Every man casts a shadow. … This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

  Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

  Mark and I decided to attend an Explore Your Shadow Self workshop. I knew that it was critically important for a healer to be aware of her own shadow as well as the dark side of healing tools—sorcery. Not everybody out there is working with the spirits to help and to heal. The course had a shamanic basis, which intrigued both of us, and I was anticipating that my shadow self would contain hidden power which, if I could find it, would make me a better and more effective version of myself.

  The workshop attracted some fifty participants and took place in a rundown condo complex at a ski resort. Our instructor was a warm, mustached sort of Marlboro Man gone spiritual. He was in his mid-fifties, sported a dark silk dress shirt and a bolo tie, and spoke often of giant, horrible, dark entities and all things shadowy. Most of his shamanic healing clients, he claimed, were “tough cases” referred to him by other healers for depossession work. He described how he often needed to do his healing work beneath large, door-sized mirrors to keep the entities he was trying to extract from “seeing” him while he worked. In all likelihood, he thought, if they “saw” him, they might come back to attack him.

  While I didn't doubt our instructor's experience, to that point I hadn't encountered anything as awful as he described in my own (albeit limited) shamanic healing practice. Of course, it hadn't been all baby otters either. I'd danced with the fierce black ma
mba, and during one of my first intense shamanic experiences, I'd seen fleeting, unpleasant things with ghoulish gargoyle faces that looked vaguely holographic, like the ghosts on Disneyland's Haunted House ride. Some looked like spirits that I recognized as dead people with agonal expressions, but a few looked more diabolical.

  One night during a powerful group healing, I had seen some ghoulish things go flying away as the client's healing took place. I immediately interpreted them as something that just did not belong—or, more accurately, as something that had to be removed in order for healing to occur. When I asked other participants about them, they reminded me that there are entities in the Middle World that are not helpful and loving. They suggested that I ask my spirits for help. When I did, I was taken to a river in the spirit world and given a cleansing and protection. To my relief, the entities did not return.

  This experience taught me that not everything shamanic is sweetness and light. Moreover, it showed me that help was there for me when I asked for it. I didn't have to face such things alone. And finally, I realized that acknowledging the darkness sometimes helps us come into the light.

  During this shadow workshop, we were supposed to develop a method for feeling safe as we work shamanically. Marlboro Man's predisposition to speak of enormous dark presences wasn't helpful, however. He even invited us to consider putting a mirror under our own beds at home—just in case—to hide ourselves and “our light” from entities who might not have our best interests at heart. This just didn't resonate with me. The shamanic work I had done thus far was deeply soulful and touching. It always brought me a sense of deep peace. I wondered if perhaps I just wasn't advanced enough as a shamanic healer to encounter or recognize these enormous dark entities. I felt it was important to acknowledge darkness and its existence, but I wasn't feeling inspired to give it that much attention.