The Making of a Shaman

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1978 The Yoga Student

The yoga student was now firmly established in spiritual practices. Daily meditation, asanas and yoga nidra, along with 5 hours of classes per week, brought a certain stoic stability to an otherwise tumultuous life. His marriage had been unable to sustain the different life directions that each partner had been pursuing, and he had finally left. Immense sadness accompanied this move, as he enjoyed his children’s company so much, and missed them deeply. When he had finally recognised the need to leave, he was heartbroken, and cried deeply. A loved friend comforted him and placed her hands on his feet, praying for him. At that moment, for the first time he heard the "inner voice”. It reassured him that he was blessed. That simple event maintained him through years of subsequent difficulty. At times after returning his children to their matrimonial home, he would lie in bed, clutching a sacred amulet worn around his neck, while he sobbed the pain of separation from his children. He knew that had he not heard "the voice” that one time, he would not have been able to navigate that deep sadness. In subsequent years, at various crisis points in his life, "the voice” would emerge again. Always unbidden, gentle, reassuring, blessing and self-regarding, it was a sustaining phenomenon that might emerge whilst walking a track, or pausing to look at nature. Its gentleness always surprised him, and it withstood his critical question, "Am I making this up?” to become an accepted part of the way in which Spirit communicated with him. It often addressed him by name, with a soft cadence and inflection. It was not a voice recognisable as any that he had previously heard, neither was it accompanied by delusions or inner panic or substantial disorganisation of the psyche that would have denoted madness – so he came to accept it as a blessing that Spirit would bestow as necessary. During these years images of a rural healing community began to crystallise in his mind. Back to the earth, organics, orchards, mudbricks, solar power, communes, alternative lifestyles, vegetarianism all found a fertile space in his mind. He became an adviser to several community schools - parent run with child-centred curricula – and his educational radicalism pushed the boundaries of the tertiary Institute at which he taught. He inspired and led a community-based post graduate teacher education program, where he and some of his colleagues based their educational activities in a local community. They abolished lectures, and held meetings at a shop which they rented in the local area, and at staff members homes over dinner in the evenings. The team of staff and students raised money for the rent from Government grants and wine bottlings. The staff agreed to work by consensus and over the four years that the program ran he learnt much about team work and collective decision making and responsibility. In their final year they needed another staff member to improve the program, and when the Institute refused to appoint extra staff they pooled portions of their salaries to employ another member part time. Instead of dissertations, the students had to create an educational activity in the community that fulfilled a need, and record their path through that. Educational conservatives in the Institute and others were concerned by what they saw as the blatant radicalism of the program, while he and his colleagues argued that all educational programs have values, this one simply made its values apparent and conscious in contrast to the unconscious hidden agenda of other university programs. His yoga teacher formed a committee to establish a rural yoga community and he poured his energy into articulating that project. He and others scoured the countryside within 120 kilometres of Melbourne, looking for suitable venues – flat land, some trees but cleared for agriculture, permanent water, pleasing aspect, easy access. Having heard of how you could "visualise” situations, he developed clear criteria of the ideal physical attributes for such a project. He eagerly devoured permaculture – a new concept for planning the interaction of living systems – and finally presented his outline to his teacher. He was crestfallen and taken aback when she confidently pronounced that his concepts would not work, and shortly thereafter lost enthusiasm for the project. But the fire had been lit and he continued to read, absorb, talk, integrate, dream, and travel into rural areas to find the right place. Often he would take his three children and they would spend time in the country camping by rivers, absorbing the healing powers of nature, sleeping snugly in their Kombi camper, always on the lookout for that ideal piece of land. All the time he was continuing to meditate, attend workshops, absorb material coming from the Findhorn new age community in Scotland and to open the tracks inside himself through which his destiny could enter. Finally he gathered a small group of people and invited them to a meeting to commit to forming the nucleus of a future community. Unknowingly, he chose Wesak, the evening of the highpoint in the esoteric calendar when the energies of the Buddha and the Christ are closest to the earth. As the circle of four meditated to birth the energy that would found the new community, the room was flooded with the energy of Buddha and the Christ, in degrees which amazed the participants. Later when he realised that they had been flooded by the energies of the Wesak festival, he took it as an omen of great blessing for the project. During this time with a new partner he had joined an inner city community of four households, that shared backyards, appliances and some meals and sought to articulate a common vision. Composed of a Uniting Church minister, a psychiatrist, university lecturers, social workers and a naturopathy student, they presented extraordinarily diverse views and directions as they stumbled along trying to find commonality, asking themselves and each other, "What do we want?”, and "What is our vision?”. The process of agreement continually foundered on the rocks of democracy, as atheists, new agers, Marxists and card carrying Christians, sought to find common ground and to convince each other of the truth of their own perceptions. From it he learnt how not to build communities, and after two years of seeing how the process didn’t and couldn’t work, moved on.

From time to time the circle of four would make excursions into the country looking for the ideal place. One mid-Spring day they heard of a twenty-acre property in a rural lane in the Yarra Valley. As fate would have it they missed that place and arrived at the end of the lane to meet a couple living in a caravan, while they were building a house and planting a vineyard. Upon hearing of the land they were looking for the local identity announced, "You wouldn’t want that piece of land”, and referred them to the last block beyond them with a track through a rainforest beside a creek. The land, however, was very different to what they had envisaged. It was obviously unsuitable. It had recently been partially cleared, was hilly, there was no permanent water, with bulldozer tracks still on the ground. It was bare, barren, with difficult access, and obviously unsuitable. Still it was the last property on a dead end road and surrounded on three sides by State Forest. And Spirit had delivered them there without them knowing about this place.

So they sat, linked in, meditated and asked the question of Spirit, "Is this the place to build a community?” When they opened their eyes, they were greeted by a resplendent rainbow. Spirit had answered the question. This was the place.

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