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Ecstatic Postures and Altered States of Consciousness with Laura Lee - Ep 121
468 Plays8 months ago
Connecting with rock art, sites, and artifacts is often important for gaining understanding. Today’s guest is Laura Lee. Laura is Vice President and Director of Research and Outreach of Cuyamungue, The Felicitas D Goodman Institute and will discuss ecstatic postures and altered states of consciousness.
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/rockart/121
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Transcript
Introduction to California Rock Art Foundation
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. I'm the president and founder of the California Rock Art Foundation. And what we do is we identify, evaluate, manage, and conserve rock art both in Alta, California and in Baja, California.
00:00:21
Speaker
We conduct field trips, we have trainings, exercise, we do research, and in every way possible we try to preserve, protect, and coordinate treasures of Alta and Baja California rock art, of which there are many, and diverse. We also work closely with Native Americans and partner with them to recognize and protect sacred sites.
Supporting Rock Art Conservation
00:00:42
Speaker
So for more info about the fabulous California Rock Art Foundation, you can go to carockart.org
00:00:48
Speaker
Also, I'm open to give me a call, 805-312-2261. We would welcome sponsorship or underwriting, helping us to defray the costs of our podcasts, and also membership in California Rock Art Foundation, and of course, donations since we are a 501c3 nonprofit scientific and educational corporation. God bless everyone out there in podcast land.
Introduction to Episode on Shamanism and Cosmology
00:01:16
Speaker
You're listening to the Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure, and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
00:01:33
Speaker
Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is your host, Dr. Alan Garfinkel. For your rock art podcast, episode 121 with Laura Lee, who's one of the executive directors of the Felicitous Goodman Institute, which studies ecstatic postures and altered states of consciousness.
Laura Lee's Journey to Ecstatic Postures
00:01:53
Speaker
talk about something that's of intrigue and has a lot to do with shamanism, rock art, and the indigenous cosmology and imagery.
00:02:10
Speaker
Welcome, everyone. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel, your host. And I think we're blessed and honored to have a very special guest today, Laura Lee, who is one of the co-executive directors of the Felicitous Goodman Institute. And she'll be talking about ecstatic postures and altered states of consciousness. This is a topic that I have a great deal of interest in. Laura, are you there?
00:02:39
Speaker
Hello, Alan. I'm here. Thanks for having me. Great. So I'm here in Bakersfield, California. Where are you? I'm in Sedona, Arizona. Great. Great. So I always kick this off with sort of the million dollar question. Tell us a bit about your background and how you ever got involved with the study of ecstatic postures.
00:03:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting story. I have a degree in English literature and a minor in art history. I speak more mythopoetic than I do science or academia. I'm interested in story and the meaning of life and culture and our adventure. What does the world mean and what is our place in it kind of questions?
Mystical Experiences without Plant Medicine
00:03:22
Speaker
And I grew up in a radio family in Seattle. And so I was hosting a radio talk show.
00:03:28
Speaker
and nationally syndicated for many years. And one of my questions was, well, who are my indigenous ancestors? We who are of European stock can actually trace it that far back in one continuous line, as in other parts of the world, in indigenous cultures that managed to retain their identity.
00:03:49
Speaker
up to the modern age. And one of our listeners called in and said, oh, well, you need to talk to Dr. Felicitas Goodman. She has an answer to that. And so I did. I found her, called her up.
00:04:01
Speaker
I scheduled an interview, and the story she told me just resonated so deeply that I had to go and attend one of her workshops. So after this interview at the top of the hour, I'm asking her, Dr. Goodman, Paul and I, my husband, Paul and I, we have to come. Sign us up for your next workshop.
00:04:21
Speaker
And so off we were. What she said to me during that and many other interviews since we got to spend and work with her the last 10 years of her life was that we are all empowered.
00:04:36
Speaker
for mystical experiences.
Ancient Techniques for Altering Consciousness
00:04:39
Speaker
This was a great answer to me because I'd had spontaneous mystical experiences since childhood. And I was not about to go take any kind of plant medicine or psychedelics or drugs. I didn't need to. I was already like one foot in that realm as well.
00:04:57
Speaker
And growing up in an age where this, you couldn't talk about this until recently, it was great solace to me to know this is normal. This is what our ancestors felt was, well, if you could do this, then there was something wrong with you. So, and I decided early on, I wasn't crazy. The world was, and that's very difficult to be healthy in a world that's out of kilter. And so the appeal of the early societies was, hey, they were all about balance. They were all about,
00:05:27
Speaker
writing their relationships within oneself, within one's community, and with the universe at large. And I was on a similar quest. That's what our radio show was about, talking with the world's experts in all of the fields on the leading edge.
00:05:42
Speaker
And asking those questions, those eternal questions, who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? And what's it all about? And so after a while, after working with her, my husband and I just felt that, oh, it's like Buckminster Fuller would say, find what you and you alone can do and do that. And we had gotten enough out of radio and talking to all the experts we wanted
00:06:06
Speaker
that it was time to dive deep into a practice. And this one appealed to us so much. There was no guru. This was about the relationship between you and the all that there is. This was about self-empowerment, dial it up on demand, and that our physiology held the key to this access code, a doorway within, to amping up.
Connection Between Rock Art and Rituals
00:06:34
Speaker
I guess you'd call it biohacking of the ancients.
00:06:36
Speaker
amping up our awareness, our expanded perception, and being in direct communication with direct experience to whatever this larger sphere is. And so we happily became directors of this Institute and it's about
00:06:54
Speaker
Hey, where do we go from here? This institute has a official title, Kuyemangai Institute. It's a place name in Santa Fe where Goodman founded this. But the mission is, hey, we have an ancient technique, one of many. The Benevolent Universe has given us many techniques to open up to its larger sphere. This is an ancient one with a fascinating story in history, a very effective one.
00:07:21
Speaker
And where can we take this? So that's what our mission. Goodman gave us a wonderful academic foundation. We have 50 years of archives. We have thousands of people around the world who've done this, learned this. And as an institute for our modern age, where do we go from here?
00:07:38
Speaker
So Laura, the overlap between what you've spoken about and the study of rock art is a rather interesting interplay. Oh, it is,
Neurophysiology and Emotional Responses to Rock Art
00:07:49
Speaker
yeah. I've been fascinated by the particular gestures that are found
00:07:57
Speaker
in the iconography, regularly patterned gestures that appear in both rock art images and also in some of the ancient portable statuary, let's call them. And also from the standpoint of a book that I co-authored recently that was published by Bergen relating to the study of rock art iconicity.
00:08:24
Speaker
And what we mean by that is basically looking at rock art imagery in terms of its signification, its semiotics, its metaphors. You're speaking about the postures that are depicted in rock art and indeed in ancient art around the world was what Goodman decoded as ritual instructions. And it's fascinating that
00:08:45
Speaker
Many people now are coming to that same conclusion independently. We found many of them. They reach out, they contact our Institute, and we were delighted that it's kind of obvious. She would describe it as the clue that's in plain sight that nobody recognized.
Rituals for Altered States of Consciousness
00:09:01
Speaker
that here the instructions are, as depicted in figures, human figures, seen in rock art and ancient sculptures, terracotta to stone, to cave paintings. I mean, the earliest postures we use are from artifacts that are 40,000 years old from Isaijira.
00:09:19
Speaker
So it looks like this was a very long tradition. And indeed, the other fascinating thing about this, to do with rock art, is we find in rock art, one of our favorite, personally, my husband Paul and I's favorite postures, and it's depicted around the world. Everywhere we look, there's one of the same postures. And so you have to ask through time and geographical distances and different cultures,
00:09:46
Speaker
How is it that similar postures show up again and again and again that are memorialized in this world collection of ancient art?
00:09:55
Speaker
Exactly. And that's been something that's been fascinating. I've found very few pieces of literature on this very subject. Felicitas Goodman is one of those. And there's another gentleman who had a classic piece that he reviewed this kind of depiction, this kind of metaphoric gestures that are exemplified throughout the world. There's two levels to this. One is
00:10:22
Speaker
that when you see such gestures according to my colleague, who's an East Indian professor at Guanajuato University, when an individual views such images of rock art,
00:10:40
Speaker
It causes one to activate certain neurophysiological responses and one... Indeed. One garners emotions. So in other words, it's not simply viewing something, it affects us physiologically and gives us a bit of a message. How's that? Does that make any sense?
00:11:03
Speaker
That's a nice description. We see human flourishing. We see out of every session. And our sessions, by the way, perhaps I should describe them. And this is the protocol that Goodman established back in the 60s and 70s was that there
00:11:18
Speaker
are rituals around the world for calling the spirits, for setting up a sacred space. And by calling the spirits what she did and what she meant was, hey, let's just activate this larger sphere. Let's knock on its door.
Scientific Investigations into Altered States
00:11:33
Speaker
Let's recognize this universe as the intelligent and living being that so many early societies felt it was.
00:11:40
Speaker
And she would just shake her rattle to the four directions, up and down as well, and make a bit of an offering. She used cornmeal. It was classic in the Southwest. She would do a little bit of a breathing exercise. She said that early people probably didn't need this. They were so akin to walking in and out of these doorways, these inner doorways, like you and I do, our physical doorways, but that we Westerners needed just a few minutes of some deep, rhythmic, even breathing.
00:12:10
Speaker
And then she would have a stand in a posture that she would demonstrate, not show us the artifact at that stage, but just demonstrate. While she rattled, gored rattle at a monotone fast beat for 15 minutes, it's that fast that this works on us, that her physiology makes this shift. And then we would have this soul flight or spirit journey. This waking dream is what I like to call it.
00:12:38
Speaker
and visionary, but also many of the other senses. A sense of a magnetic pull pulling you down, a sense of hurtling very fast through the universe, a sense of expansion, contraction, a sense of spinning often, heat, cold, hearing other sounds or voices over the rattle. So many things can happen. And you know she came from a study of glossolalia.
00:13:04
Speaker
she was made breakthroughs in that field. And her premise there was watching people in a Pentecostal church in Mexico City prior to all of this was, hey, when people move into speaking in tongues, she felt it was a trance state that they entered from the intonation of the preacher, from the expectation of talking with them.
00:13:28
Speaker
And it was the delivery of a monotone beat and swaying often and letting go and that they would fall, not all that often, authentic tongue she felt, but it would happen. And she was the first to suggest that it was a trance state that people fell into that would temporarily overtake their speech centers. Fascinating.
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah, what I find is that now that's a widely accepted and breakthrough position on that. But what I find is that somehow, one of the physiological responses we have is that it must temporarily overtake our vision center, we're not where ours are close during this, and yet we're seeing visions. So it's something piped down through not our optical, but into
00:14:15
Speaker
center that is delivered much as a dream is that we're downloading something from a pace. Something from our mind that we're pulling sort of out of the corridors of our senses. Let's stop it there. Sure. And we'll pick it up on the next segment. See you on the flip-flop, gang.
00:14:37
Speaker
Welcome back. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. We have Laura Lee with us from the Felicitous Goodman Institute. We're talking about ecstatic postures and altered states of consciousness and other ways to think about altered states of consciousness.
00:14:56
Speaker
Laura, so we stopped at segment one and we're talking about some of the means by which we can enter into these altered states of consciousness without using any sort of psychotropic substances, is that correct? Yeah, you know, I think the anti-engines are generated from within in certain
00:15:16
Speaker
practices such as ours, I think that why would nature give us those neurology for ecstatic states if it wasn't also going to give us the activation methods for these salted states? So I think that it's what I've learned is that they're surprisingly easy to enter into without any outside agents and that the body loves these. You mentioned flourishing before, the emotional state, and that is something that we do see in our sessions is that
00:15:46
Speaker
They are ecstatic. They are touching something larger than ourselves. And when we were talking about the visions earlier, what's also surprising and what landed my husband and I to say there is something real going on here. This isn't just from our own our own minds. This is something of a shared
00:16:05
Speaker
a shared mind, something larger that we're touching. And that is that we can do a session, and we do this on Zoom currently via the pandemic, really pushed us all into Zoom. And it works perfectly, by the way, over Zoom. I think it's because we're entering that state, it twix in between, where the center is everywhere and the boundaries are nowhere, those subtle states. And then we connect on those levels. But we can also, for many years, we're doing this workshops in person and invariably,
00:16:35
Speaker
we would have a session where, at the end, everybody shares the highlights of their journeys. We go around a roundtable one by one. And it's only after that that we are sharing, hey, this is the artifact that inspired the posture we just did. Two things that are interesting that happened that are noteworthy, and this is what keeps us intrigued and researching.
00:17:00
Speaker
is that
Therapeutic Potential of Ecstatic Postures
00:17:01
Speaker
we will have shared elements of a vision, whether it's the same posture or different posture. In each session, there are across-the-board commonalities, temperature shifts and sound shifts and time shifts.
00:17:14
Speaker
all of this, right? A whole spirit journey that you're on, but that there'll be elements that are shared by the participants unique to that particular session, and also that some deep meaning comes up. There's a theme that comes up that is like a life lesson.
00:17:34
Speaker
on the eternal wisdom sages at the ages type level that comes up and it's as though we are actors on the scene that we are players on a stage and that the visionary journey we're given which is much like a dream you inhabit a dream body an energy body a spirit body and then you go off exploring and the laws of physics are rather different inside that dream
00:17:57
Speaker
For example, we find that if we're in a pool of water, we're in the ocean, we can breathe underwater, no problem. We can fly, no problem. We can journey down wormholes out to the outer edges of the cosmos, no problem. So the laws of physics are different there, or so to our perception. So we find that there's some commonalities there. And we find that often there's a cultural clue
00:18:24
Speaker
in the artifact. So, for example, we can say, oh, here, let's do this posture. It'll be from a goddess artifact, a Venus artifact in a particular pose. And people will report even men feelings of nurturing and sexuality and fertility and birthing, pregnancy, holding a child, being a child, this regeneration and rebirth happening across the board.
00:18:53
Speaker
So, and it's only then that we go, oh, look, it's a Venus artifact. Isn't that interesting? So it gets intriguing on many levels. It seems like this kind of exercise might have tremendous scientific value.
00:19:08
Speaker
In the study of rock art, have you applied any of this to particular images of rock art panels or the kind of images that appear on rock art panels?
Research on Neurological and Cultural Aspects
00:19:21
Speaker
Well, I would like to suggest that a rock art figure that we're all familiar with
00:19:28
Speaker
that we find around the world is one of our favorite postures for Paul and I. And it's the one where the fingers are spread very wide. The arms are held up to either side in a kind of a W. So your elbows are pointed down and your hands are about the level of your shoulders and your feet are spread, right? And so we stand in this posture and do our thing. It's extraordinary the amount of energy that pours through you.
00:19:55
Speaker
And it's as though we are liaisons between the earth and the heavens. The energy, we feel like the hollow bone where we're just a conduit for energy. The hands get activated, the hands start pulsing often, they get very hot. And so often we find that afterwards the rattle is ended and we're just slowly coming out.
00:20:18
Speaker
back into shifting into this reality, because it certainly feels like we have a foot in this world and a foot in that world. And it's like driving a car, you can upshift, downshift, depending on where you're going. And we're slowly looking back, your hands are activated, you feel like you are a font of energy. How are you going to use it? People are doing, I myself do this too, hands on healing for oneself, radiate out to the universe. It's important not to try to do that, not to direct this
00:20:48
Speaker
process during the rattling. During the rattling, it's about receiving the vision. You are the recipient, you are the transmitter receiver, but there's downloads happening. You want to just be open to that. But afterwards, it's like, oh, you are activated, you are energized, do with it what you will. And so a lot of the also healing activity takes place in those several minutes after the rattles ended. And we're
00:21:13
Speaker
then going to pick up a journal. It's important to write, that's part of a ritual, write it down. These can be as fleeting as a dream. We had a neurologist friend, Garrett Meyer out of Germany,
00:21:26
Speaker
who had experimented a lot with lucid dreaming, who came and spent a week with us at our Institute. And afterwards he said, you know, it's not lucid dreaming. I've studied that, but it's kind of the same cloth. And I said, Garrett, describe to us what you think is happening in the brain. He said the best explanation he can give us was you are remaining fully awake. So your centers that support the waking state are fully on. They have not turned off, but simultaneously,
00:21:54
Speaker
we find, he believes, that the centers that support the dream state are also activated. Not all of us, not a full dream state, but many of the centers. And I think the visionary processing, the traveling in a spirit body, all of that, you are landed in that kind of a dream body. And the scenery in front of you is very much like a dream.
00:22:18
Speaker
It shifts, it changes, it morphs, but somehow you navigate that and you know the rule set, you know what you're doing. It's like you are being fully informed at the same time. So one part of you
00:22:33
Speaker
is that dreamer while one part of you is that witness to this from the waking state. So we call it being in two worlds simultaneously, a foot in both worlds.
00:22:49
Speaker
colleagues and people that participate in these exercises, I would say must have a shamanistic kind of akin to a shamanistic experience. Am I correct? Indeed, indeed. And in fact, so much of the same iconography that is so well known in the shamanic realms, we see. What I like is that we don't advertise, hey, come and be a shaman, you're going to have a shaman journey.
00:23:15
Speaker
We just say, oh, come and do this. So people from all over the world come who aren't schooled in any of this. And we all see the world tree. We can become the tree. Our heads are up in the heavens as branches or trunk in the middle world. Our feet deep into Mother Earth as roots. We experience that. We shape shift into a tree, for example. And there's an upper, middle, and lower world.
00:23:40
Speaker
We are journeying. We don't shamanize on behalf of others, although that can happen. We've had some extraordinary journeys. But this isn't a dialing it up that I'm going to project and do this. It's more like I receive a vision. And somehow that vision just becomes exactly what we need at that time, uncovering parts of ourself that we didn't know needed healing or attention.
Ancient Practices and Modern Knowledge
00:24:06
Speaker
But certainly that happens.
00:24:09
Speaker
So yeah, it shares a lot with the shamanic world. And I personally in Goodman believed this too. She felt that this was the realm we all inhabited. We had ready access as early cultures. And then shamans then became specialized in this. But she felt that the reason that humanity lost this was just the vagaries of time and our relentless pursuit of progress.
00:24:35
Speaker
that in small tribes, everybody partakes. But as we became specialized and grew, I guess the ice age ended, agriculture became more possible, communities grew larger. Then we started to specialize with the kingship, the priest, who would say, oh, now you can only access those realms through me. And then the farmers and the military and the artisans and the bakers, and everybody was specializing.
00:25:03
Speaker
And she felt that's when we lost already access to these realms historically. So as in the contemporary study of shamanism, there's a number of scientific and medicinal aspects that are now being explored. You mentioned micro doses of some of the, you know, the very powerful
00:25:26
Speaker
altered states of consciousness from these various medicinal plants. Does any of your experiences have profound effects on individuals that perhaps are having are troubled either physiologically or in other ways?
00:25:43
Speaker
Well, Goodman would say that you need a healthy nervous system to do this and that we are not therapists. And so I would hesitate to advertise, oh, come for a healing. Right. I mean, we've had people that have showed up in our workshops who are bipolar and who are on various medications.
00:26:04
Speaker
and stuff and, you know, wow, I don't feel equipped to handle that kind of thing. That takes a therapist and a specialist knowing what they're doing. We're more for your average, healthy, nervous system seeker. But I feel that the physiological shift there is so beneficial in healing, but all of us need healing, right? This is a world out of kilter. We're all out of balance. Absolutely.
00:26:31
Speaker
healing and it is interesting that we have many advisors that we work with from academic fields and one of them is Christine and Todd Vanpool out of the University of Missouri who both teach anthropology there. Christine teaches courses in the spirits the anthropology of spirits was one of her latest books and cultures the shamanic cultures and Todd is a cognitive anthropologist she's a cultural
00:26:59
Speaker
And she's been doing our work with us since the pandemic started in April 2020. We went online
Emotional Healing through Ecstatic Postures
00:27:04
Speaker
and she soon found us. And she's contributing so much, both of them. And one thing she does is when we are doing a Mesoamerican posture, for example,
00:27:14
Speaker
She could often pull down a pot behind her because that's one of her specialties and look at the iconography and make some direct correlations to not only the geometric patterns on the pot and that people have seen with the entoptic phenomenon, but also the cosmology and some of the experiences we have relate directly to the myths
00:27:37
Speaker
of those cultures as well, though people don't know it. It's interesting. We're not all versed in the mythology of all the ancient cultures, but it certainly crops up aspects of it and helps us explain why we have the visions we do quite often. The vanpools took us to the cognitive neurology lab at the University of Missouri
00:27:57
Speaker
where we underwent some EEG tests. We did six sessions with our practice between Paul and I. That was just in February, so we're waiting for the results of those. But we're going to be curious what we find there. But this underscores the sense of a waking dream, where both the dreaming mind and our waking mind are activated simultaneously. There were glimpses of that when Goodman was invited to the universities
00:28:26
Speaker
of Munich and later Vienna, and they were doing several tests there, EEG among them, that showed beta plus theta. Fascinating. Not enough to... Just a few subjects. There are physiological processes going on as well as neurological processes. And let's dig deeper on that in the next segment. See you in the flip-flop, gang.
00:28:49
Speaker
Welcome back to segment three where with Laura Lee from the Felicitous Goodman Institute talking about ecstatic postures and altered states of consciousness. And Laura at the prior segment, we were talking about some of the physiological and neurological effects of these experiences. What's been some of the more remarkable manifestations that you've seen or experienced in your time working with this particular modality?
00:29:19
Speaker
Oh my, Alan, I'm writing a book on this with some of the in the range of experiences that we have.
00:29:26
Speaker
and with permission from those people. Because these are very personal and sacred experiences, of course. But I want to share one of my own. And this was when my father died. I was so close to my dad. And it was devastating when he passed. And I just felt crushed. Like I was at the bottom of the ocean. I couldn't breathe. I was so surprised at the physiological
00:29:53
Speaker
and physical pain of grief. And I know that we do have psychopathic postures. Within, we have Realm of the Dead postures. I mean, we have postures for many different things. And Goodman would test these over the years and just say, oh, these are purposeful. These ancient people had various rituals, and these postures were part of these rituals. And they had purpose from divination to general healing and finding balance to initiation, which is
00:30:23
Speaker
brooking life, death, and the promise of
Personal Transformation and Universal Energies
00:30:25
Speaker
rebirth, to metamorphosis and shapeshifting, to living myths, to divination, these downloads of insight. So I knew I could go do A Realm of the Dead, I knew I could go resolve this, but I was a little hesitant to do it.
00:30:41
Speaker
But it was when a friend came between workshops and she was requesting, oh, hey, I'm here from Europe and can we do? And I was like, yeah, let's pull some people together. So I always had people at the ready wanting to do this work.
00:30:57
Speaker
So here I was going in again and you know sometimes it really doesn't matter which posture you are doing, what the spirits and believe me we don't have a belief system or dogma here, it's really how do you define spirits? How do you define this realm of this universe in which we live?
00:31:14
Speaker
Is it all between your ears? That works. Is it the universe as one being and we're all a cell within it? That works too. So it's not about belief. It's about direct experience. And I was not expecting this. But here I find myself in this journey going so, so deep.
00:31:32
Speaker
and I happen upon an underground chamber and there is a cage with bars and I walk up to it and it's my father who just been deceased and he's there. My father was a very dapper dresser. He took great pride and just and taught us all you present your best self always. He was quite the disciplinarian and here he is looking quite out of sorts in these ragged
00:31:59
Speaker
old coats, a series of ragged old coats and under his feet there are these burning embers and I was also feeling like so many regrets that his passing like even though all of my siblings spent months with the family and were there not for the heavy lifting they had help but
00:32:22
Speaker
just to tell the stories and remember our childhoods and tell them how much they meant to us and go through the life lessons and just all those rituals you do as a family knowing you're about to lose one of the members. And I still had regrets. Did I tell him enough? Did I, you know, the times that I didn't do as he asked, the life decisions, the times I was too busy to come home, all of that, right? I still had regrets.
00:32:51
Speaker
and I was suffering too and I walked up to him in this vision and I said here let me take that coat off of you that doesn't belong on you and I dropped it through the grate and it would burn up there would be another coat I drop it and through the grate and this tattered after tattered garment I would drop through the grate and it would burn up until finally I saw this shining being in front of me oh wow
00:33:18
Speaker
And it was him with all his regrets. I had helped release him from his regrets. And then he looked at me and he started to take these tattered garments off of me, which were my regrets. And we both became these bright shining beings and we could just exchange all of the love that there was.
00:33:38
Speaker
And I was resolved. And I came out of this experience and I was healed. I had no more regret. I felt that I had met him on our own terms and I had resolved. And he had resolved everything between us. And I came back to the land of the living emotionally. And so that was one of the more profound ones for me.
00:33:59
Speaker
I would say so. That's absolutely remarkable and amazing that you had that experience. And it's like shamanizing for yourself.
Adapting Ancient Practices to Modern Life
00:34:08
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely remarkable and amazing. When I think about the posture that we were talking about, one of supplication perhaps,
00:34:18
Speaker
is one of them. And I was mentioning that before. I've seen it a couple of times, actually, in rock art, where there's a being, a spirit being or some other kind of a figure. And it looks as though it's in treating a larger figure that's some sort of an animal human figure or some sort of a much larger deity. What do you think is going on there?
00:34:44
Speaker
Well, I could speak to this from a couple of the goddess postures, and one of which is a statue in Alabaster, I believe, of a naked woman with her hand out. Her left hand is out and her right hand is by her side. And this is such a beautiful gesture, and this is such a beautiful experience. We have other postures where both hands are out.
00:35:09
Speaker
We have postures where you are lifting your arms straight up. That's a little harder to hold for 15 minutes, but there it is. And it's really about entreating the universe to engage. This is about calling forth the spirits, as Goodman would call it. And she, as an academic, she was also very much a mystic.
00:35:27
Speaker
She would say, who am I to change the language or that relationship just because I grew up in an era in which that is no longer accepted widely. But this is about engaging the universe.
00:35:42
Speaker
I really truly offer many thousands of people Todd and hundreds and hundreds of sessions that we facilitated. When that offering is made, it's she would hand us a little pinch of cornmeal. She she was in the Southwest. Her headquarters, the institute she established was on an ancient village site in the northern edge of Santa Fe. The institute has seven four hundred and seventy two acres. There are this ancient rolling juniper field landscape.
00:36:11
Speaker
and old Adobe buildings. And I've come to learn because we have taught this in conference rooms, in laboratories, in living rooms, in classrooms. We taught 100 students at Parsons Paris in France. We've taken this in a laboratory at work just fine there. We also have taken this to a museum exhibit where we worked with a modern artist, Melo Callan.
00:36:36
Speaker
And we advised her, here are the ritual tools we use. Would you come and do a performance piece that you could choreograph on this? We could guess what we wanted to be authentic. So there we were at the Palais de Tokyo in a big modern art exhibit hall in Paris, right across from the Eiffel Tower, where we spent many weeks. We advised her, these ritual tools have to function like this, which she beautifully did.
00:37:00
Speaker
And we created our performance piece on the stage, which was basically our ritual. We took some of her Parsons students and taught them the ritual, and it worked. We all had trances. And there would be windows around us. And the audience even understood it so beautifully. They would hold the posture with us. They would close their eyes and meditate with us. They got it. It's that you create a sacred space and people act accordingly.
00:37:28
Speaker
So we have taken this to many, many environments, and what I have learned about this is that you are opening that door within. You can choose not to, and you won't have as deep as an experience, I suspect, but it's about opening up. It's something about you open your pores up, you open your heart up, you become willingly.
00:37:51
Speaker
surrendering to this great divine sacred space of a cosmos that we inhabit and you let the energies pour forth. That I think is the key to this because we have been in those various environments where it's not about cornmeal,
00:38:07
Speaker
You can't toss it around. It's not about lighting candle. It's not about smudging. You can't do it in some of these spaces. But it really is about the energy, the gesture that is, I think, a readout to the body as much as it is to this cosmos and this sphere, this field, whatever it is. And that it's about you taking that step willingly across the magical threshold, much as Joseph Campbell describes, and then you're off on a hero's journey.
00:38:37
Speaker
And then eventually the rattle stops, you come home back to this ordinary reality. That's
Conclusion and Further Engagement
00:38:45
Speaker
a good place to stop, Laura. That was absolutely remarkable. I love the word pictures you're able to compose about the nature of the experience using the way in which you use the ecstatic postures and altered states of consciousness in such a remarkable and
00:39:07
Speaker
impressive variety of ways. How can people perhaps get in touch with you? The Kweemunga Institute holds regular free and open sessions in this work. And Kweemunga is C-U-Y-A-M-U-N-G-U-E Institute. Kweemunga is just a place name and dot com. And then we offer sessions. We also have a podcast of which you must come and be one of our guests.
00:39:35
Speaker
Because, you know, we're exploring this greater universe and everything that I spoke about is just born of the direct experience of entering into this world. Absolutely.
00:39:46
Speaker
valued, so much larger a spectrum of our mental modalities than just the linear and rational thinking that we price today. And so when we open that bandwidth, oh, life becomes juicier, richer, more exciting, and quite deep. It does. It really does. And it's rather remarkable. I know being an archaeologist, anthropologist,
00:40:10
Speaker
and working on the comparative religion and rock art spheres. It's endlessly engaging, as I call it vis-a-vis the experiences I have with rock art, and I'm sure the same holds for your kind of work. So what a blessing it is to have you, Laura, and thanks so much for honoring this platform and sharing your enthusiasm. Thanks so much, Alan. It's been a pleasure. See you, gang, on the flip-flop.
00:40:45
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:41:17
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.