This speech was originally delivered at the Transforming the Mind Conference, held in Portland, Oregon, in March 15th, 2008 at the National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM). The ambiance at its oration was inspiring, so much so, that NCNM’s president, Dr. David Schleich was asked to share it for a wider audience to view. That’s you, the Helfgott Blog crew, thanks for reading. Please note that this speech will be delivered in two acts.
Let’s move deeper into those neurosynaptic places. Indulge me a moment as I try to suggest what transformation kind of means for me.
Like you, I have been blessed with transformative moments, a symphony of them in my life, it feels. A cascade of moments when being stuck in one way of being or knowing smacked me in the chest like the saxophone of a great jazz piece. I know I’ve walked into such zipping moments like a drowning man. But, overall I have wanted to receive them and welcome subsequent movement, away from stuckness.
Okay, it’s 1977 and I’m a volunteer in Collins Bay Penitentiary in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I had been teaching inmates basic grammar and writing skills. A man named Roger Caron, now a famous and once rich Canadian writer, walks abruptly through the door of the library classroom and crashes into me. A brown grocery bag of manuscript he was carrying tumbles to the floor and the pages scatter everywhere. The guards are suspicious. The inmate who owned the pages of writing told me later that he had been thinking of asking me to look over his manuscript, his book, his work of eleven years, but had never come to the English class I had been conducting for eight Saturdays in a row in his prison. He was too shy, too worried that what he had written, from a foundation of a Grade Six education and a picaresque life of crime and punishment, would be laughable. And, just ahead of the transforming moment which followed, he didn’t know it was the last day, the very last moment actually, of the class and that I was not to return there until the next year. Somehow he pushed back his lack of confidence about any value the writing might have had and decided to check it out.
It was my last day at Collins Bay. That instant of collision changed everything. I helped him pick up the pages. I learned about what they were. Foolscap and notebook paper. Everything written in pencil. 1803 pages. Raw material, really; what W.O. Mitchell, the beloved Canadian author of Who Has Seen The Wind, called “lumber”. We talked until the guards made him go back to his cell. I read the 1803 pages over across the next week. Getting unstuck for Roger, transforming this account of 24 years in prison and dozens of bank robberies from an idea of a book into a book, required courage and choosing. Zip ahead 17 months. That bag of writing became a national best seller in Canada and in France and in England: Go-Boy! sold 110,000 copies in its first manifestation, and ultimately over one million. It transformed into 260 pages of compelling writing.
Roger was paroled. He went on to write three more books before robbing more banks and going back to jail, where he is at this very moment. How many times he had hesitated. That day he didn’t. I went back for whatever reason. Roger was stuck but opened to unstickinng, to unstuckness. He got unstuck in the coming weeks as we began the torturous process of getting those 1803 pages into a fabulous manuscript form. He awakened to other possibilities. I got to edit a Canadian classic. I could see no other path and soon he could see no other path.
Yet another transformative moment occurred in Uluru National Park, Northern Territory, Australia. 1984. I watched the sun set over Ayers Rock and remembered again, as if for the first time, the utter relativity of geologic time. Fourteen years earlier I had climbed Parker Ridge in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta and came across an outcrop of sedimentary rock way up at the crest of the Columbia Icefields; sedimentary rock filled with coelentera fossils. I wondered how Devonian Sea shells could end up at 8,500 feet above sea level. And at this later moment, on the old continent of Australia where young mountains like the Rockies have been worn down by millennia of seasons, as the sun slid to the vanishing point on the horizon, the grandeur and rich red massive impossibility of that massive monolith being on the ancient sea plain reminded me of the same question I had had at Parker Ridge and in that transforming instant I felt the painful slam and majesty of a human lifetime measured against the eons it took to reveal Ayers Rock to my eye. My tiny life, that ancient rock formation. The vast space of hours and days and years and millennia separating them. But in that one carved instant, that transforming moment, I understood relative geologic time. I felt geologic time.
One day in 1997 another William Mitchell, this time better known as Bill, and a beloved naturopathic doctor, did a herb walk at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine. We were northwest of the City. Dr. Mitchell took some Popsicle sticks and some string and marked out a square metre of ground near a small congeries of coniferous trees. In the next hour and half he explained the riot of competition and artistry of the juniper plant, the cooch grass, the taraxacum and eleven other plants in that single square metre of ground. Suddenly, again as if for the first time, the utter simplicity and the utter complexity of life and time bashed into that moment and transformed my sense of plants and the yearning of life for the sky forever, again.
Within medicine, there is such a desperate need for unstuckness, although we don’t often label it that. We label it as “behavioural patterns”. We know that behavioural patterns make up something like 30% of the contribution to health (genetics and environment being the other 70%). In natural medicine there is a focus on these behavioural patterns. How do we change those patterns? How do we transform our consciousness about those patterns? We change our mind. We change the lens we use to look a things. We put up Popsicle sticks and string and focus on a plant whose very existence is as complex as anything imaginable and as simple and inevitable as anything imaginable. Sometimes as we transform that lens, it’s an unconscious instant which does it for us.
Sometimes we’re aware of our decisions; we make “conscious” decisions. We make a conscious decision to understand that all water yearns for the sea, that all life yearns for the sky, that the absorbing of frequency-specific radiation such as photosynthesis or vision or the conversion of chemical energy into motion, or magnetoreception in animals is as much about awakness as it is about getting unstuck.
Transforming consciousness in medicine involves many dimensions you’ll hear about in the next two days. It can be about developing new outcome measures for evaluating CAM therapies; it can be about the doctor herself whose sense of that self is locked up in external signifiers of what medicine is; it can be about the history of medicine, for example, in that understanding more about the political, social and economic rhythms of how our natural medicine professions take shape in civil society is as transformative for some as understanding how quantum biology can illuminate energy medicine. Getting it that the naturopathic and classical Chinese medicine professions are moving through precisely the same processes in professional formation as the mainstream allopathic medical profession did between 1906 and WWII of the twentieth century can be massively transformative. That healers can comprehend the intersection of quantum physics with shamanic practices can be as powerful as realizing how a geosyncline created the unutterably beautiful vistas of the Rocky Mountain cordillera.
There are so many perspectives, so many clues that the gods and goddesses, that mother Earth has sprinkled around our campfires. There is the ethnobotancial lense. There is shamanic journeying. There is the extraordinary power of words in cascading cadences of image and idea. There is emotional freedom technique.
The next two days is about becoming unstuck. When we start to look at how natural medicine fits into peoples’ lives, we remember that for a long time, for too many people, natural medicine has been in the unconscious; it’s the food that people don’t think about; it’s the exercise they don’t get; it’s the information which can empower them about which they are not aware.
We’re now waking people up all across America. We’re moving natural medicine from their unconscious mind into their conscious mind. When we do that we make connections. We create practical resolutions for unresolved states.
We thank the goddess for women with Boticellian hair who walk down dark green hills on seashores to transform the spirit of the men who wait on beaches alone. We accept the timeless rhythms which make possible an Ayers Rock possible and an outcrop of Devonian seabed fossils ten thousand feet in the sky. We know that it is not an accident when prisoners bump into teachers and best sellers result which affect the lives of thousands. We know that doctors like Bill Mitchell knew that the micro and the macro are the same thing, the same exquisite dance, the same delicate high art of transforming the mind from the all too easy numbed amble through all this magnificence to a stream of consciousness yearning for the sea, a living sea, a very beautiful sea.
Enjoy these two days … enjoy every minute. We are so glad that what when we imagined you being here in this Great Hall a long time ago and sent your ideas about being here that you took up those ideas and brought those and more to this moment.
David Schleich, PhD
President, National College of Natural Medicine