The Alchemical Body 2020

The Alchemical Body
Movement and the Way of the Shaman

‘My friend they are returning again, all over the earth, ancient teachings of the earth, ancient songs of the earth, they are returning again upon the earth’.

From words spoken by Crazy Horse, Lakota, Sioux. 1840-1877.

Abstract

This chapter introduces the idea that, while embodying a ‘shamanic state of consciousness’, a shift of perception can arise akin to the Alchemical process. Within the process of Alchemy, it is suggested that two seemingly opposed states are brought together together into a conscious relationship, that within the present moment engages with all potential, past, present, future, seen and unseen, to support entry into something ‘other’.

Through addressing body and awareness from the perspective of shamanism and environmental movement as a form of alchemy, I describe the practices that can support the simultaneous coming together of different states that can allow entry into an altered state of consciousness. I will refer to ways of experiencing presence, time and movement, that I believe provide valuable insights into unseen potential within time and space that usually hidden to us within ‘ordinary reality’ and which are perhaps more readily open to us through a shamanic sensibility.

I will look into one of my own works ‘Coat’ as case study through which I may enter and shape my enquiry, I will describe the work and also name shamanic practices that I adopt consciously and perhaps unconsciously, which support the emergence of the sensibility that I seek to inhabit.

The hunter prepares for the hunt with ceremony and with prayer.
She is utterly still, she brings her attention to her breath, she is centred in her body, her awareness is active in all directions, she is filled with the present moment.
The hunter is awake to all that is.
The hunter is tracking with all her senses, she becomes aware of the presence of animal, she has ‘seen’ the animal with all of herself.
The hunter asks permission of the spirits and then respectfully begins to enter and merge with the field of the animal. She asks for the gift of the life of the animal, that she may receive the life-giving nourishment of its body.
Within the stillness the animal consents to give herself away.
The hunter is centred in her body, her heart is open and connected to the heart of the animal.
With a prayer she releases the arrow from her bow, its tail trembles in the air as the tip travels towards the heart of the deer.

The tip of the arrow enters the heart of the doe, at the moment that she willingly gives of herself.
The hunter gives thanks to the spirits and receives with gratitude the nourishment and life of the doe.
Her blood, her flesh, her skin and bones will serve the hunter and the people. The hunter and the people will eat the flesh of the doe with gratitude, her skin will become medicine drum. The song of the doe will sing on and on through the heart beat of the drum.

It is said that in the days of the ‘old ways’, in the times when humans more consciously relied upon the earth day to day, for food, shelter, clothing and tools, that ways of being were born out of and through an instinctual inhabiting of both the body and heightened awareness of the movement within the cycles of the earth and the sun and the moon and the stars. In these times, humans were seen as ‘living at the bottom of the sky ocean’, an indivisible part of the biosphere of the earth.

These were shamanic teachings. Shaman is a word from the Tungus people of Siberia and translates roughly as ‘the one who sees’. The shaman translated messages from ‘our relations’, winds, moon, bodies of water, animals and plants, for those who did not understand them. The shaman once lived on the edges of community, she was the healer, she knew where the medicine plants grew and when to hunt for animals for food and could divine answers to questions from the people. The primary work of the shaman was to maintain balance, balance within the self, the other, the community and the earth, she followed the path of wholeness and balance in the ways she knew and that had been given to her by those who had gone before. She was a messenger between the worlds which she always approached, as a close relation, with great love and respect.

Once again many humans are seeking wholeness and balance, within ourselves, our communities and the greater cosmos.

The contemporary growth in the study of a broad base of shamanic teachings, which long ago emerged in similar form through many and different cultures and places on the earth, sits at the root of this call to understand how the ancient teachings may be reawakened and incorporated into all aspects of life in the 21st century. It is my seeing, that there is a renewed interest in this ancient understanding as an answer to a call to remember at our core who we humans are. This call is arising as we become more aware of a growing state of imbalance within ourselves and within the whole biosphere of the earth.

For well over a decade, I have studied and practised both shamanic teachings and Earth Wisdom teachings through Northern Drum Shamanic Centre and environmental movement supported by the work of Helen Poynor. As I have become more familiar with these practices, I see that my physical body, my sensory body, my emotional body, my creative impulse and spirit align with many of the ancient teachings that I have received. So much so that I now live and work through these practices absorbed into my daily life and they shift me into a new sense of living. In this way I apply shamanic practices to support all aspects of my work and life, environmental movement practice, performance, ceremony, healing work and as guardian of Vision Quest. Embodiment of the teachings connects me to their ancient lineage; this sense of connection allows me to trust the responses of my body and to respect and value the information received through all internal systems, and from the elements and all living beings that I exist within and as a part.

As I enter practice, I call the nature and sensibility of the ancient hunter to become awake within my body and through a wider awareness of time and space. I am informed by this awareness. It allows me to work from within a deep level of intuition on all planes. Within the present, I am opening towards and following at the same time. As I follow I am able to remain connected moment to moment to a knowing and understanding of the truth of what emerges. I have a sense that I am following an ancient thread of creative impulse that exists and at times touches into my field well before I have any conscious sense of it. To begin with, when the thread begins to come into the physical realms, I may have no conscious idea of what it is attached to. I and my way of working become the portal or entry point for the creative impulse to emerge into the physical. I simply align with it and allow my own creative spark and imagination to join or to follow the flow of its emergence.

Since before I can remember, I have been curious about the nature of things transformed or left behind; pebbles, owl pellets, bones, feathers, driftwood and much else. Soon after beginning the active study of shamanic practices I began to find and collect bones, vertebrae in particular, with a curious earnest. As far as I was aware at the time, I was collecting with no particular intention other than curiosity and the joy of finding. I seemed to come across animal vertebrae wherever I walked. In time, I had accumulated a large collection of bones of both birds and mammals both from the ocean and from many lands. One day, as I contemplated the bones it occurred to me to string the animal bones into one long spine in mammalian structural order from neck to tip of tail, to see what would arise. What arose next was a ripple and a sense of magic, like an old tale come to life and then almost at once I received a strong image of wearing a coat, akin to a tail coat, made of blank painters’ canvas, with a tail long enough to trail upon the earth behind me as I moved. The spine of animal bones would be attached to the neck of the coat and hang free down the back. The blank canvas of the coat and the attached spine, could, I perceived, serve as a conduit for the emergence of ancient stories. At once a call was made to the ancient hidden tales of the earth and inhabitants to be remembered and awoken through the gentle brush of the tail of the coat, to become painted into the warp and the weft of the fabric and thus through their essence return to the present.


Coat. Hilary Kneale. Omey. Connemara. Photo Christian Kipp

In this chapter, I look into characteristics of embodiment and shamanic sensibility in relation to body- based creative work, through the case study of one of my own works. I contemplate ‘Coat’, as the core study for this chapter;, it is a piece which has developed over a period of years, emerging as a physical presence inhabiting different places on the earth, as performance, as story and as film, which can be viewed at www.hilarykneale.com. ‘Coat’ is one strand in the tapestry of my work and experience, that calls in a shamanic sensibility. I have chosen it as vehicle for my inquiry because the strong narrative of the work holds clear examples of what I refer in the title to as ‘The Alchemical Body’ and it illuminates three key shifts within body, awareness and sensibility. These are;

* Cultivating an embodied shamanic mode of attention.
* Entering the portal. The point of shape shift.
* A wider sense of movement and time. Entering the ‘Mystery’.

Cultivating an embodied shamanic mode of attention.

Pulling on the coat feels like an ancient skin regrowing. I sense my arms inside the sleeves, my hands emerge awake and vital. I see hand, skin and bones and claws and paws of all potential. The spine of animal bones hangs against my back, presses against my own spine through the fabric of the coat. As I move, there’s a rattle of a song between spine and spine. I crouch by the stream at the place where two clear springs tumble from under rocks in a bank beneath an ash tree, the water tumbling and merging into the greater moving body of stream water, water coming together with other water. I sit quiet. I listen wide.

I begin to move slowly, easing my way through the thickening air of early dusk, it is touched by soft golden moonlight, the air shimmers around me in the softening light. The tail of the coat slides through the stream as we cross and re-cross her path, cold clear waters shine out under the moon, painting the moonlight over the tail of the coat. The fabric of the coat glistens, its warp and weft newly vibrant, like sea washed pebbles left by the outgoing tide. The colours of the coat’s many travels are now a memory within the tones and hues of the canvas.

I and the coat begin to merge. Touching the earth footfall by footfall we move away from the stream, although her presence travels on with us as song in the air. We pass over thick moss-covered rocks, moving four pawed then rolling beneath the reaches of the great beech, itself winter bare and cloaked in soft moss. We sit as one, taking time to enter deeper into the stillness of the present moment. What is the sound of the story without the words, we listen to the whisper of what has gone before. We are awake.

The shaman traditionally ‘journeys to other realms’ to the sound of the drum, in mediation, and through ceremony to seek information in relation to wholeness and balance. Sometimes she may ‘shape shift’ or merge with another creature to assist with the task at hand. In my experience a shamanic state of consciousness creates a connection supported by and beyond the imagination and through into the greater mystery of all existence.

I am wearing the coat, preparing to journey into its hidden realms. I allow my breath to deepen into the lower energy centres of my Base and Will centres. My attention is fully in my body, heart open, back awake, creating a three-dimensional awareness of my physical being, a sense of renewed vitality courses through my body. I sit in a state of stillness, eyes open in soft gaze, adopting a wide peripheral vision. Calling support and protection from spirit, I breathe deeply into all my energy centres to allow them to open and balance, I am connected deep into the earth, through my Base centre. When I feel ready and I sense a strong support and protection from spirit, which comes into my awareness as a thickening and a quickening of energy around the container of my physical body and also a sense of a supportive or ‘knowing’ presence. With the power of my intention I enter a shamanic state of consciousness and wider awareness and merge with the coat. I merge with the soul of the coat, the animus, and shift shape into our dual nature, spirit and matter join together. I sense the merging though a subtle sensory experience and quality of body-mind and expanded time and thence begin to move. Slowly at first, my fingers and hands and then my arms, fill with the energy of life force, like the power of rising sap, moving out from the animal heart of myself, I follow this impulse;, now I am both of the earth and with the earth. This quality of movement feels akin to the first power of creation, unknowable and yet somehow clearly mapping itself into repeating shapes and cycles as it emerges from the core of existence.

Entering the portal. The point of shape shift.

We are awake.

I tremble within the shifting states of the portal. To begin with I have an awareness of the call from both sides, my focus is in flight as though pulled and honed by the tip of the arrow travelling before me. I, as Coat, am held within the portal of its slipstream. All around me the colours of plants and trees appear to be growing more vibrant, everything shows itself in great detail, what I see imprints itself upon my retina, details are slipping in to me under my mind and entering my memory to become a part of my animal body, a part of the place and time of my existence. I become Coat, I tingle with excitement through the shift of shape, bones are a-rattling, I call the layers of unknown deeper in, diving into the depths of perception. I am filled with wonder and the curiosity of experiencing everything in its purity, as though a young child.

I am crouching low, low to the earth, tail behind me as though ready to pounce or to run or to fly.

In a lifetime or in a moment I sense that I have passed through the portal.

The ways of passing through the ‘portal’, can be unpredictable and unknowable. In this instance, before my call can be returned by its echo, I sense a need to crouch low to the earth, limbs animal wise, aware of all sensations in the structures of my feet and hands, now rising through my spine against spine. Stories begin to jostle and sing in the air around me and under me the earth is whispering.

I perceive that as I enter a shamanic state of consciousness and so move through the ‘portal’, ‘Coat’ and I surrender into the unified field of energy in time and space, inside which I become fully present in body, mind and spirit. The shift into another state of being is palpable, I am ‘other’, I have entered another ‘realm’, at the same time I am aware of my surroundings and a sense that I have come home to myself more fully. Having passed through the ‘portal’, nothing exists other than an expanded and timeless present moment, held within the movement of all that has passed and all future potential. I sense that the life force or energy behind everything becomes ‘visible’, from the moment of shape shift until I re-emerge through the ‘portal’, at which point I am simply aware that I have returned to ‘ordinary reality’ and my ordinary self.

Entering the ‘Mystery’.

To attempt to unpick experiences that only bloom for a moment is perhaps to destroy them. I am clear that I cannot think about being of the ‘Mystery’ and be of the ‘Mystery’ at the same time; one potentially dissolves the other. At the same time, I see that words speaking through the remaining imprint of experience within the body-mind have the potential to return through the portal and with a quality of echo, speak from the essence of ‘Mystery’.

I am speaking with Chris Luttichaü, founder of Northern Drum Shamanic Centre, author of Calling us Home, in which he writes about the value and relevance for our times of shamanic teachings and practices. We speak about the nature and quality of the ‘Alchemical Magician’ or Alchemical Body, which is referred to in the old teachings. A shifting of shape based on oneness, a movement of both perception and body is the energy that shamans call upon to transform themselves into something other for purposes of seeing, teaching and healing. As Chris speaks of the ‘Alchemical Magician’ he describes it as a ‘core shamanic term’ saying that its meaning is akin to the alchemical process (Luttichaü 2017: 143). The Alchemical Body is seen as embodied transformation, bringing a capacity, in shamanic terms, to shift from ‘Ordinary Reality’ into ‘Animated Reality’. He describes ‘Animated Reality’ as a oneness, non-duality and interrelatedness and says that through inhabiting this quality we can fully enter the circle of life, the sacred hoop, the ‘Mystery’.

The ‘Alchemical Body’ holds the capacity to bring change through movement of mind, body or shape, to change from moment to moment like a little child and with that comes a capacity to renew vitality and to live with integrity.

David Abram, cultural ecologist and environmental philosopher, writes of his own experience in relation to shapeshifting. He describes the moment when, after many months of study and practice with a shaman in the Himalayas and after many failed attempts, he is finally able to shape shift into raven. Through merging with the bird, Abram experiences himself flying through the high mountain valleys of Nepal.

‘A vertigo rises from my belly into my throat and I’m falling, I’m falling. Gonna die for sure… I’m balancing, floating, utterly at ease in the blue air. As though we’re not moving but held, gentle and fast in the cupped hands of the sky. Stillness. Through a tangle of terrors I catch a first sense of the sheer joy that is flight.’ (Abram, 2010: 256)

Stillness of mind is as much a key to inhabiting a shamanic state of consciousness and entering the ‘Mystery’, as is movement. Stillness of mind or ‘body-mind’ supports wider connections to the macro and the micro within all bodily systems bringing increased vitality and potential for movement. Movement does not replace stillness, the two states become one. I refer to movement in its widest sense, movement as presence in the body, as cycles within the systems of the body, and all aspects of time, and within the collective consciousness of the earth and the wider cosmos.

In a lifetime or in a moment I sense that I have passed through the portal.

Birds songs sing out the last light of day. Grandmother moon rising at the full point of her monthly flight. Night sounds herald the evening star.

Hush closes round the sounds hush hush hush little one, sleep now, they are waking.

I enter Coat, we become. Again there’s a pulling body to body.

Deep in the belly is a hearing of them waking, hearing the old ones beginning their nightly journeys. It is a low rumble of a sound that shimmers the sky to speak of thunder. A rubbing of face and paws along the fox path to seek the way through the tangled web of the growing. Body remembers where the light falls at times when grandmother moon shines through the shimmering darkness. This night moon hides her fulsome form cloaked in cloud. Animal rememberings find the way as pores open up to them. Lower and lower to the earth we tumble, until we smell our way through to the night scent of oil beetle. Eyes drink in glistens of rain caught as diamonds round the openings in earth bound spider web. She has woven time after time and time after time the great weaver repeats herself. Arching backwards and pouring over the mighty limbs of fallen trees, we descend into the earth, through years of the slowing we enter her body.

After time and so so quietly a song begins to sing, to open lungs and heart and throat to sing a name and to sing the earth and the moving water and the falling trees. Teeth gnawing the edges of the earth where it is opened by the stream to depth of bone. Entering the stream to become a glisten of a tail in water under the moon, of moon. Lumps of silence easing out of the earth become song. Knots of words held under the fallen trees emerge tendril like over fingers and claws. Eons of story begin a rattle through the spine of animals rolling and cajoling amongst the night dark bluebells. Songs become a remembering once more. Limbs flail wildly as words pass as stones through liver and kidneys and spleen over and over they crawl out through the groaning places. Stories are leaving the warp and the weft of coat, wildly sparking like fireflies as they meet the night air.

Settling all about, we see that they are stories returned from the dark sky.

We are of the dark sky.

We lay amongst them in the arms of all, lay amongst them resting in the arms of all, hear all…

It is through awakening to this quality of movement and with a connection into expanded time that I am now called to enter the ‘Mystery’. In the nature of the Alchemical Magician, my shape shifts, I become ‘Coat’. I have a sense of being connected to and aware of everything, all is in motion, all is still. Now is the time to dream the way of the future.

She stands as deer in the quiet of herself. She will give of all of herself when the moment comes. Time expands, the hunter, the arrow and the doe are held within a slipstream of time, meeting at the point of the arrow.

References

Abram, D. (2010) Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books

Luttichaü, C. (2017) Calling Us Home. London: Head of Zeus

Further Reading

Eaton, E. (1982) The Shaman and the Medicine Wheel. Wheaton Il, USA: Quest Books

Gintis, B. (2007) Engaging the Movement of Life: Exploring Health and Embodiment Through Osteopathy and Continuum. Berkley, California: North Atlantic Books

Halifax, J. (1979) Shamanic Voices. A Survey of Visionary Narratives. New York: Dutton

Harner, M. (1980) The Way of the Shaman. San Francisco: Harper

Hay, D. (2000) my body, the buddhist. Hanover & London. Wesleyan University Press

Turner, K.B. (2016) Sky Shamans of Mongolia. Meetings with Remarkable Healers. Berkley, California: North Atlantic Books.