I just got back from a medicine walk around the woods where we live. It was raining lightly so I used an umbrella but the rain stayed light and most of the water falling on the umbrella was from leaves that have just appeared over the last week here in Vermont. Anyway, what is a medicine walk? I think I will answer that by first explaining what medicine is.
Medicine (borrowed from the Native American lexicon) is whatever heals. It can be a plant or a power or a dream or a message from an animal or insect.
A medicine walk can be approached several ways or any number of ways, but the main idea is that a medicine walk is a very intentional walk and we take it when we are looking for medicine. A medicine walk can be taken anywhere, in the city or the countryside or the desert or the woods.
What is special about a medicine walk is, we are engaging in what Jung called participation mystique. We are dissolving the distance that most of us maintain between us, as subject, and world or our environment as object or "objective reality".
Everything on a medicine walk is meaningful just as it is, and everything that happens is synchronistic. But don't get self-conscious about it. It's ritual, sure. We are setting the intention to maintain a receptive but otherwise quiescent attitude toward the activity of taking a walk. Look at it this way: When we take a psychedelic we are advised to pay attention to set (mindset) and setting. So, with a medicine walk, if we can maintain receptivity as our mind- "set" for entering the setting of the walk, then everything can be experienced as a synchronicity or a meaningful coincidence, while we are on our medicine walk.
Again, everything is the medicine: The song or appearance of a bird, or the absence of birds, perhaps an annoying siren, the smell of smoke or a distant chainsaw, or the wind picking up, or a lull in the wind or sunlight finding an opening in the clouds or a certain cloud that catches our attention, some little thing that appears in front of us on our path or sidewalk.
As in any meditation we can have thoughts, but don't fixate on any thought, just let it go, good or bad, positive or negative.
The walk can be short or long. Make sure you are wearing the right layers so you don't have to deal with being cold or wet. For those with poor circulation, light gloves might be a good idea. Whatever we need to help us focus on our intention to walk intentionally. This frees us to merge with our setting.
As with a vision quest, it is not about having a vision or some kind of breakthrough or realization. The whole vision quest is the "vision". So with the medicine walk, the whole walk is the medicine.
Lastly, there are two thresholds. There is the threshold of starting the medicine walk where one can imagine a threshold across which, once we step, we have begun the medicine walk. (That can be our front door.) And there is the threshold of ending the medicine walk. I recommend expressing gratitude as we approach the closing threshold, gratitude to who or whatever you want. (For me, it is Creator. Creator for me is the intelligence of the universe, intelligence defined broadly as the intelligence behind the appearance of life, and the appearance of me (!) but also the intelligence behind the creation of the cosmos. My experience of Creator is that Creator is infinite and personal, depending on my mood or needs. Sometimes Creator is weather, sometimes Creator is a friend, sometimes, on a trip, Creator is the road! Infinite is infinite.)
Expressing gratitude is good joo-joo, regardless of who or what you are thanking.
Give yourself some time after crossing the exit threshold to acclimate to being in a world where everything that happens doesn't necessarily have to carry meaning, and where synchronicities go back to being rare and special events.
Have fun. It's not a test. You can't fail.
Write down what happened if you want. You can keep a log of your medicine walks.
(Article changed on Apr 30, 2023 at 11:36 AM EDT)
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