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Ways To Wisdom
Sleep on horseback / The far moon in a continuing dream / Steam of roasting tea. – Basho
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The Hero's Journey
Entering Sacred Space
Entering sacred space was the theme of the first session of the Joseph Campbell and the Story of Your Life workshop. Sacred space is the place Joseph Campbell referred to as your “bliss place”; where you can find yourself: again, and again, and again.
At one time or another, we all knew about “sacred space.” To regain access to it, Professor Campbell suggests that you ask yourself: “What was the game you enjoyed when you were a child? What did you do as a child that made you forget time?” Therein, he counsels you’ll find a familiar gateway back to your “sacred space.”
I knew “sacred space” in my early childhood, lost track of it through adolescence, and unexpectedly found it again in a place called the Aikido dojo. The marvel and wonder of sacred space is that the more times you go there, the more ways you find for getting back.
There are many ways to enter into sacred space. One of these is the dance of Tai Chi Chuan which teaches how to be in sacred space, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing: at work, at school, at home, and on your way.
Sacred Space for Modern People
Hundreds of years ago, a Zen master offered an insight into the nature of “enlightenment” when he said: “Before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water. After enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water.” This perennial wisdom still applies today: “Before rediscovering sacred space, I went to work and took care of business; after rediscovering sacred space, I still go to work and take care of business.”
On The Way
At BIOM—A Conscious Place for Health & Well-Being—you can experience and learn some tried and true methods for experiencing “sacred space.”
FREE Key to Sacred Space
Send an email and write in the “Subject” line - “Sacred Space” - and I’ll email back to you a short and simple ritual that you can do each day to open the door leading back to your own unique sacred space.
The Night of the Iguana
“Everything old is new again,” the adage says, and that was our experience when we ‘channel-surfed’ onto the 1964 movie version of Tennessee Williams’ play, “The Night of the Iguana”; starring Richard Burton, Deborah Kerr, Ava Gardner, and others.
While the whole story was a sojourn into a sense of surrealness, it’s ‘right-in-the-gut’ reality rose up and out through the heart of ‘Hannah Jelkes’, a self-described spinster from Nantucket, who travels the world with her 97-year-old grandfather - “the world’s oldest living and practicing poet” - moving from one hotel to the next, while Hannah picks up money doing sketches of the guests, and grandpa recites his poems.
Endurance
At one point, ‘Hannah’ and ‘Shannon,’ (Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon) an Episcopal clergyman who, having been locked out of his church for “fornication and heresy,” and has been reduced to shepherding cut-rate bus tours through Mexico, share the truth of their current experience: Shannon speaks of his “panic,” and Hannah her “Blue Devil,” whom she has learned how to “endure.”
This idea of endurance is interesting: a ‘grin and bear it’ stoicism, combined with optimistic perseverance. Unfortunately for Shannon, he ‘medicates’ his panic with alcohol, while heroic Hannah “takes breaths.” She says: “Some people take a drink, some a pill, I take breaths.”
The Way of Endurance
Intrigued and inspired by Hannah’s bold simplicity, I wanted to gaze some more through her window to the world, so I “took some breaths,” followed my thoughts inward, and asked myself: What are a few things someone can do, to ward off the “Blue Devil,” or at least endure it?
Here’s what I came up with:
Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey
This section of The Dojo is inspired by the work of the late Joseph Campbell.
The insights of this master of mythology and masterful teacher continue to shine, and provide people with the clarity needed to take the next step towards that greatest of life’s accomplishments: a feeling of a life well-lived.
Most of us who know of his work, became aware of Joseph Campbell through his interviews with Bill Moyers on public television in the late 1980s. Out of these inspiring and guiding interviews came a shockingly simple and uplifting admonition from Campbell to the listener: Follow Your Bliss.” By which he meant:
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”