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Vision Quest (Crow Medicine)
Sol Luckman
No sooner had I left graduate school at the end of May, 1998, than I was on my way to a brand-new variety of education that tremendously broadened my horizons—while also imparting much life energy, or chi (sometimes spelled qi), to my depleted and struggling systems.
Qigong is an ancient technique of energy healing related to tai chi. Through one of my remaining friends, I had been put in contact with a gifted qigong teacher, an American also in his early thirties who, several years previously, had traveled to China to study this venerable art to cure his extreme chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS or CFIDS).
I did not travel to China. But after the yard sale of yard sales, I crammed my scant belongings into my car and spent two days driving nearly twenty-four hours from the East Coast to New Mexico, where my qigong teacher taught a popular class attended by as many as a hundred students three times a week at dawn.
I think of this transitional, challenging and magical period of my life as my own personal “vision quest” that, for the first time, opened my eyes to the often misunderstood and underestimated worlds of spirit and energy.
In many indigenous cultures, the vision quest is the form initiation takes and constitutes the transition from adolescence to adulthood. When the initiate is old enough for vision questing, he (or she) typically spends several days or weeks alone in the wilderness, often while fasting.
Eventually, a particular animal, sometimes called the “totem animal” or “animal medicine,” visits the initiate in a dream, vision, or (more rarely) waking state.
The appearance of the totem animal embodying a specific spiritual power indicates the individual’s innate calling—which after returning to the tribe, the newly initiated young person pursues following a time of apprenticeship.
Curiously, I did not realize (at least consciously) that I was on any kind of vision quest. To be honest, I did not even know what a vision quest was.
I simply was living like a hermit in the windy, sage-covered high desert; eating the few foods my ravaged immune and digestive systems could tolerate; and practicing qigong often half the day because I intuitively felt I had to in order to survive.
Certainly, I had no awareness of being a shaman in training!
Now, anyone who has ever regularly spent half an hour “hugging the tree,” the primary practice in medical qigong, knows two things.
For starters, an enormous amount of bioenergy (chi) is pooled by maintaining this oddly difficult position between standing and squatting, arms loosely draped around an invisible trunk, eyes remaining calmly unfocused on nothing in particular.
The first time I experienced this powerful energy, it literally knocked me on my rear. I lay on the ground outside my rental panting for thirty minutes as waves of electric heat like cosmic hot flashes shook my body again and again.
This was the energy I ultimately used to strengthen myself enough to go on with my life. But I needed an entire summer of practice just to be able to accommodate it gracefully.
The second observation made by serious “tree huggers” is that in that meditative state where you are supposed to think about nothing, sometimes you successfully empty your head. But more often, you think about anything and everything.
Such was my case at first, but then an odd thing started to happen: every time I hugged the tree and aligned myself with the flow of spiritual energy, I thought of crows.
Ever since I was a kid, strangely, I had felt a strong affinity for crows, learning to imitate their caws and always appreciating their presence. But now, whenever I did qigong, crows were all I could think about. Not just that—crows started to appear everywhere in my life.
They circled raucously around me as I hugged the tree under the autumnal sky and perched beside me on my porch as I sipped herbal tea and wrote in my journal. Crow statues seemed to appear like weeds, suddenly and uncontrollably, all over my quaint little New Mexican town.
Almost every night, I dreamed of crows. I realized I was into the music of the Counting Crows. And when I started dabbling with watercolors, for the longest time crows were all I wanted to paint.
A fellow student in my qigong class, overhearing me describe my weird fascination with crows, was kind enough to loan me a copy of MEDICINE CARDS: THE DISCOVERY OF POWER THROUGH THE WAYS OF ANIMALS.
Turning to the section on Crow Medicine, I learned that in many native wisdom traditions, Crow is the totem animal, or “medicine,” that “knows the unknowable mysteries of creation,” guards holy texts, and upholds the sacred laws of being.
As keeper of the Creator’s linguistically-based knowledge of creation, as recorded in sacred texts, Crow is gifted with the special ability to modify universal rules and “shape-shift,” both personally and collectively.
In other words, Crow’s innate talent involves knowing how to manifest new ways of living and being.
When shortly thereafter I was prompted intuitively to read a magazine article (featuring a crow graphic) on vision questing, I realized in an epiphany that for months I had been receiving visits from my totem animal!
Apparently, Crow was trying to tell me through its repeated cawing that my calling involved recalling that I knew something important about creation, holy texts, and sacred law.
Humorously, I visualized myself as a phoenix-crow hybrid, a jet-black bird engulfed in indigo flames, hugging the tree with my wings alight as I stood pooling chi in the middle of my ashes. I actually painted a little watercolor close to this description.
The only problem was, while the phoenix imagery was crystal clear, it was years before I was able to grasp the meaning of the crow part of the picture.
But eventually, as I came to fathom the true nature of DNA—which you will not find in biology textbooks, but will learn more about shortly—while developing Potentiation, I understood why Crow had come to me so insistently.
DNA is the language-based holy text, the sacred law of creation that Crow guards and shape-shifts by calling out its inherent potential through linguistic means.
In fact, as I explain in detail in CONSCIOUS HEALING, the Regenetics Method very well may be an example of a type of ancient healing speech applied to genetics referred to in the Koran as the “Language of the Birds.”
(Excerpted from POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD)
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. You can learn more about Sol’s nonfiction, fiction and art at www.CrowRising.com.]
Riverwalk
Sol Luckman
I have seen two Crows
Locked and spinning
A tempest in a tempest
Across the windswept sage
Up over the Cañón rim
I have met the Otter Woman
By the riverside and
Felt the gift of her watery Medicine
Heal the worry inside
As for my feminine side
Downstream the Beavers are no joke
Just in the nick of time
As May approaches
They dam a swimming hole
For me and mine
My son will think it the Brandywine
I do not have the inclination
Or the heart
To contradict him
Not being myself so motivated
I thank the Beavers for the industriousness
That flows riverlike
Through the floodgates of
Their white buck teeth
Shaping gnarled driftwood and brush
The Rio flows from a wormhole
They say
The Indians call Blue Lake
Cascading down through the adobe Pueblo
Into what is known as the Riffles
From time to time
Following the water’s leaping edge
I commune with a Blue Heron
Seeming to wait for me
Perched high and hieroglyphically
On the sculpted lava rocks
I wonder if the Heron comes from Tula
If he flew up out of Blue Lake
A stargate bird
Bringing messages of hope
From a world beyond
A better one, where we all are headed
Copyright (c) 2011 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
Previous Blogs in this Series:
Enjoy this recent interview with Sol Luckman on Followers of the Way Radio.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and the newly released POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. For information on the “revolutionary healing science” (NEXUS) of the Regenetics Method, check out www.PhoenixRegenetics.org. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. Characterized by Reader Views as a “modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND” and by Apex Reviews as a “mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast,” BEGINNER’S LUKE is also, as literature professor Niama Williams has written, a “spiritual journey that you do not want to put down.” Share the Adventure of an imaginary lifetime by visiting www.BeginnersLuke.com. View Sol’s paintings and learn more about his work at www.CrowRising.com.]
