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Awareness

Meechgalanne always said that awareness was the key to the hidden spiritual secrets that underlie all life. “Awareness is the key to life”, he would tell me.  He said awareness and survival skills were the first steps to being truly connected to all things.  Complete awareness of wilderness (the external world) and self (the internal world)is the truth and power of life and the sacred path through it. Meechgalanne told me many times that this level of awareness was so important to learn and incorporate into the everyday life before I began the rest of my skills in life. No one could learn these things by cheating or shortcutting.  There are no quick ways to obtain this knowledge.  It would be impossible to know, understand and venture into the spiritual realm of life without first understanding and seeing the physical realm completely, but whomever did this would be pulled out of the physical realities of this dream and they would lose all grounding. One day they would be confronted with a wall that would show them their separation with the physical aspects of living in this world.  So it is that Awareness is the pathway to the true spirit and full understanding of self and who we are.

I began learning all the skills of camp and living comfortably in the wild.  This included cooking, gathering food, building shelters, making fires, finding clean water, reading the weather, making clothes, making tools, setting up wind breaks and making baskets and containers.  All the materials were natural.  We never had anything made by or from modern society.  These skills I learned very quickly and they became easy for me to do. 

Meechgalanne taught me that every skill I learned had a deeper, sacred meaning that tied it to the Great Circle of All Life.  For instance, the wigwam is a symbol of life and fertility.  The wigwam is a dome shaped dwelling with one door and one smoke hole in the roof.  The wigwam itself symbolizes the womb of life.  The door represents the vagina, entry into and out of the womb.  Entering the wigwam’s door represent the penis entering the vagina to harbor peace and harmony within the earth’s womb.  The smoke from the fire, or life force, exits the smoke hole and acts as the umbilical cord to the spiritual and physical realms.  Exiting the wigwam is the symbology of birth into the physical world of being.  Just as the wigwam has meaning, so do all the other skills that were taught to me.

Survival skills followed in my training.  These included telling the direction, camouflaging, hiding, building quick fires and shelters, collecting and finding emergency water, learning medicinal herbs and their uses, hunting, snaring, fishing, travel, and of course, awareness.  These skills also came to me fairly easily.  As all skills go, the longer you use them the better you become at them.  I had a lot of fun learning all of these skills.  I was amazed at how much you could accomplish with natural materials.  Anything I wanted came from nature.

Since awareness ties all skills, knowledge, understanding and learning both physically and spiritually together, this area of my training will go on forever.  I would spend hours upon hours studying, watching, smelling, tasting, listening, feeling and sensing everything I could in life.  I stalked everything.  Even my family and pets were not exempt from me standing in their footsteps.  I saw how every little movement in the woods affected everything around for sometimes miles.  I learned to feel energies that radiated from all living things.  I could sense something moving off in the woods before I could see or hear it.  I could tell if a hunter was around, even if he was sitting quietly and camouflaged, just by his energy.  Everything I saw or felt became sacred to me.  All things natural became a necessity in my life.  Without them I felt lost and empty. The more aware I became the more comfortable I was in life.  The more things came together with awareness the more I understood all aspects of everything I saw.  Meechgalanne was right; awareness was the key to knowing.  My awareness level became so in tuned I could feel a buzzard so high in the sky that I could hardly see it.  My Teacher would say that on a good day it became next to impossible to sneak up on me.  I could even describe energy that passed on the wind and was emitted from the smallest insect, plant or the mind of a human. The “Wild Tongue” was what Meechgalanne called the voice of the wilderness. Everything has its own language he would tell me. Learn to listen to these languages and learn to understand what they say. They are all based upon a unique set of energies/frequencies. “Awareness is the doorway that we can walk through; out from the limitations of the room many live in and into the great expanse of life.

AWARENESS- The Awareness Course is coming up in September where I teach these vital life skills. If you are interested in such skills then check out the course. There is an early sign up special going on. So take advantage of this if you plan on attending. The Awareness Course is always a popular one!

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