The Avocado Medicine Wheel

Rob just finished another six-week meditation course at a local yoga studio. The last session is always a shamanic meditation, my personal favorite. There’s something about drums and rattles that transport me.  With each class, he creates a medicine wheel and we do breathing exercises and a short meditation for each of the four directions.

In his last session in May, he created a medicine wheel with Origami Peace Cranes that Adele Aldridge sent us. At the end of the class, he invited everyone to take home one of the peace cranes. In tonight’s final session he created a medicine wheel with avocados from the tree in our backyard.

This tree, which is now about 30 feet tall, languished for years without producing any fruit whatsoever.  We couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Then Rob remembered that a Puerto Rican guy in our former neighborhood said that when avocado trees don’t produce fruit, you just hit them with a bat. So four or five years ago, Rob hit the tree with a stick.

And suddenly, over the next year, it shot up in altitude and produced two avocados. The next year, it yielded a couple of dozen and the tree kept getting taller, like Jack’s beanstalk.This year, it produced 40 or 50 and we have had to pluck them before the squirrels get to them. If  you like avocados, these are beyond delicious.

The class begins with brief meditation in the four directions. First, the South. This direction is the home of the archetypal serpent, where we learn to shed the past and begin to detach from our wounds and personal stories. We learn to release heavy energy accumulated in our bodies.

In the West, we learn about the Jaguar, who teaches us about life, death and rebirth. We face fears and family shadows, and step across the bridge to learn to walk as warriors, without enemies.

 In the North, we meet the archetype Hummingbird and learn to taste knowledge directly, to manifest the impossible, and to receive ancestral knowledge.

In the final gathering we explore the East and the archetype of the Eagle, who demonstrates how to experience vision, destiny and the possibilities of becoming. We develop our vision of peace.

Then he begins a shamanic meditation with a tape by Sandra Ingerman, who was a student of Michael Harner, probably the best-known shaman in the West. I love this 18-minute meditation. Although Sandra’s voice is somewhat sharp, she uses drums and rattles, sounds that transport me. Sandra takes us into the Middle World, an alternative version of our world where mythological creatures are alive. In this place, I imagine myself in the breathtaking landscape of the Arenal Lodge in Costa Rica and have all sorts of fascinating inner experiences with beings that inhabit the lush plants and trees and flowers there.

The next place that Sandra takes us is into the Upper World, a higher spiritual realm. We can get there by riding on the back of a bird, leaping off a cliff, rising upward with smoke. You get the idea. The jumping off the cliff thing reminded me of author Carlos Castaneda, who seemed to jump off quite a few  in his apprenticeship with Don Juan. I didn’t jump off a cliff; I rode on the back of our dusky conure, Kali, who died in 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Wilma. 

I worried about riding on her since she was a small bird. But in this place, size wasn’t a problem. With this meditation, Sandra uses a Brazilian instrument – berimbau- that has a lovely sound, but isn’t quite as all encompassing for me as drums and rattles.

Then, as the finale, Rob takes us into the Lower World, where there are spirit guides, power animals, where we can connect with loved ones. In this place, I connected with one of my favorite fictional characters, Mira Morales,  a psychic and bookstore owner who lives on the fictional island of Tango Key. Mira has crept into my dreams and meditations before. This time, she sat with me and talked about the new Tango Key novel I’m writing. I often wonder if she actually exists in some parallel reality. That’s how real these “visitations” are. She gave me some pointers on plot and motives.

When we returned to the normal world, the class ended with the H’oponpono mantra, a Hawaiian shamanic mantra—I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you. Finally, the class came to an end with three OMs.  Then Rob invited the students to take home an avocado. I snapped my photo just before the avocados were snatched up and whisked away.