Ceremonialist and Earth-based facilitator Jason Hine takes us into the wholeness of being.
When I imagine ‘a more beautiful world’ I don’t imagine a place of only peace and harmony but also a world in which rage, terror, exhaustion, despair, and grief can be spoken of and held in the circle of community. In which we can weep all our tears and feel all our body grief and let it reconnect us to life.
I imagine a world in which enemies can wrathfully communicate with each other in ritualized spaces facilitated by elders and speak of their grief, their oppression, their hatred, their rage, their power disparities, their terror, and their pain and be heard equally and fully seen in this by the other side and by everyone.
A world in which we can find the power and medicine behind ideological and political and spirit possession states, and the medicine power, beauty and utility behind altered states of consciousness that are now considered to be beyond the pale, pathologized, or considered socially unacceptable.
I imagine a world in which ritualized fighting and combat, arduous rights of passage, and perilous journeys into the wilderness are prepared for with meticulous ceremonial intent and become a common way of connecting with our ecstasy, with the non human world, with our community, and our visceral embodied soul.
In which victims, persecutors, tyrants, saviors and ancestral spirits are not experienced as nightmares which cause havoc in the field of personal psychology and history as they are now, but are experienced as naturally occurring phenomena within our human ecology and communities which need to be held, honored, fed, and processed.
In which individuals, communities, and groups can enjoy and play out the roles of history such as oppressor and oppressed, victim and tyrant, good and evil in consensual agreements and find the ecstasy behind these roles.
In which aggression, rage, animalistic fury, voracious bestial hunger, blood lust, sexual lust, the desire for power and dominion and covetousness also are seen as emotions which can be alchemically cooked down to their essence, held, embodied, metamorphosed, danced, sung, and expressed in our bodies and ultimately used for benevolent purposes.
I imagine a world in which, from a place of deep satiation, joy, and satisfaction we are willing to risk our lives for our deepest calling and for service of the earth and community. In which death is honored and seen as something which feeds, serves and blesses life.
I imagine a world in which nothing is ever finished, no final answers are found, and in which our lives are frequently opened by the impossible, the unknown, the surprising, the miraculous.
