THE QUEST FOR WISDOM

Perhaps the most unfortunate consequence of modern life is the loss of the instinctual wisdom-self. No where is this more evident, than in my hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico where droves of pale and pasty tourists arrive each day during the summer months to bear the dust and heat, and peer reticently into things more ancient.

Known for its Anasazi origins, Santa Fe is surrounded by Indigenous communities with names that echo ancestral embrace—names like Puyé, Tesuque, Taos, Ohkay Owingeh, Pojoaque and Cochiti.

Most visitors remain outside these communities, preferring the less confronting safety of Santa Fe’s new synthetic side — the margarita-drenched bars, the shops with faux Indian crafts, and the Anglo-cowboy musicians. Those more curious, arming themselves cameras, hats, maps and sunscreen, load into tour buses and rental cars and venture up canyons and washboard back roads to behold what they don’t even know they have forgotten—the taproot into wisdom’s wellspring, our collective human legacy.

It is here, in these pueblo communities, that their members dance themselves back into mountain spirits, into bear, deer and buffalo. They dance themselves back into their ancestral lineage—two legged, four-legged, and winged.

Standing for hours, arms folded, eyes behind sunglasses, the outsiders watch the corn dancers, the buffalo and deer dancers. They hear the jingle of ankle bells, the beat of the drums, and feet pounding the dusty earth, calling to spirits, announcing their place on the common ground of this earth. There is, among the outsiders, at best a mild interest, at worst a kind of unnamable malaise and ennui, a sense that something is missing for us as modern people. But what it is, we cannot say.

While the dancers before them call out to those they remember, drum to the stories still alive in their bloodstreams, honor the wisdom gleaned through centuries of tradition, they are left with only forgetfulness.

We are wisdom-starved and have forgotten our way back in. We find substitutes instead—productivity, efficiency, data and metrics. The twenty first century is abundant with ways to access such information. At the touch of a screen we can know the stocks, the weather, the trends, the timing of our flight, our optimal sleep, and the best most efficient route through Chicago during traffic.

What is wisdom and how does one cultivate it? It has been defined as the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, intuition, common sense and insight. Wisdom is a disposition to find the truth coupled with an optimum judgment as to what actions should be taken in order to deliver the optimal outcome. What makes wisdom elusive are certain elements within that definition such as insight, truth and intuition.

In preparing to write this essay, I was overcome with uncharacteristic procrastination. Why was I so resistant? I realized it was because the subject matter intimidated me on some level. Who was I to write about wisdom? What I realized is that the very word implies some kind of authority, or dominion over. And in my striving for wisdom in my own life, I’ve felt anything but.

In fact, contrary to external impressions of what wisdom must look and feel like, my experience is that wisdom feels extremely vulnerable, unclear, and at times lonely.  So the very conjuring of the topic, and how I might write about it, and invite you the reader to explore it with me, placed me in a state of uncomfortable unknowing. The place, in fact, where wisdom is born. So let’s start there — in that dark, murky and mysterious place of the unknown.

Knowledge, in our culture, is valued over not-knowing. And even though the more obscure and lets say esoteric ways of decision-making elbowed their way into blockbuster business books with titles such as Trust Your Gut and Predictably Irrational, big data soon eclipsed the fad. ‘The gut is dead,’ announced a recent New York Times article on data optimization, ‘Long live data.’

Data is a way we can be certain, and when questioned, be backed up by reams of facts and figures. Data unites us, in an odd, cold kind of way, in the same way scientists might hover together over a petri dish. And to that end, it keeps us from feeling alone. Who’s to argue with the data?

In, 2007, when Barack Obama first visited Google’s headquarters as a candidate, he announced himself as less a torchbearer than a data connoisseur. “I am a big believer in reason and facts and evidence and science and feedback,” he said. But I wonder if Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King or Aung San Suu Kyi were data connoisseurs, would they have been as effective, inspired and inspiring?

There’s a crack in the data trance and it has to do with things innately living, the un-measurables. How does one, for example measure kindness? Delight? Joy? Grief? Trust? Depth and meaning?

Enter parenthood—where the hubris of our knowingness and certainty trips right over the extended foot of wisdom herself. I remember landing hard, face-planted in my own confidence, facts, figures and ideals. Parenthood brings us right to the bone marrow of existence. Why? Because, in the creation, protection and raising of another being, we place ourselves right at the heart of life-force itself, the home of the un-measurables, the home of mystery and the unknown. Perhaps nowhere in our lifetime is the opportunity to cultivate wisdom more available than in the formation of ourselves as parents.

Paradoxically, parenting is where we most want knowledge, and resist less than certainty. A simple search for parenting books on Amazon reveals over 103,000 unique titles. We want the data. And while being informed and knowledgeable is a commendable and necessary undertaking as a mother or father, knowledge without insight and intuition leaves us strident and righteous at worst, and impotent at best.

Perhaps that is why mother nature designed parenthood to be the ultimate and noble hero’s journey—an adventure rife with trials, temptations, thresholds, pitfalls, halls of mirrors, friends and foe. Because to parent a child, one must cultivate wisdom. And to cultivate wisdom, one must strike out on the journey. To survive the journey, wisdom must be won. The journey is nothing less than a return to your own wild and undomesticated self.

I created Kindred in 2002, because in embarking on such a journey I was astonished to discover how few resources were out there to support wisdom. We were given experts. We were given data. We were scolded and patronized. But few turned us towards ourselves. And fewer still acknowledged the heroism involved.

The trivializing tone through which media approached parenting and parents also shocked me. Like the Disney we watched with our children, we became cartoon characters of ourselves. We traded our leather filo faxes for cotton bags adorned with pastel ducks, our red stilettos for sneakers, and our degrees for Mommy-and-Me.

And in the lack of any honor and respect, any real community, or lineage of wisdom from our grandmothers and our grandfathers, we began hand wringing about every tooth, every word, every letter and every ounce.

So where along the way of this tumultuous voyage do we find our resources for wisdom-making? And how, if not backed by data, will we know it’s the real deal? What if we make a mistake? What if something gets broken along the way? What if what is wise in one moment, proves to be folly the next?

Once we wake up to culture, and its unnecessary grasp, then we are open to listening to the ways wisdom yearns to take a foothold in our lives. To do this, we must befriend a trinity of forces…our bodies, our communities and spirit. Together they create a potent ecology that mutually supports, nurtures, informs and protects.

Through this three-way support system, we can set up for ourselves a perpetual means to cultivate wisdom.

Our Bodies

The body holds, through its DNA, an ancient remembering and intuition informed by all who came before us, our ancestors and the ways they walked this earth. Each cell holds a wisdom way of knowing forged through millennia. That is why the drum beats in Indigenous ceremony around the world, so as to wake up the body through a vibrational resonance that each cell carries.

It is interesting to note that most religions, theologies and cultures vilify, objectify or mechanize the human body. “Our body are the horse our head rides around on,” writes Linda Kohanov in The Tao of Equus in her calling to refer to our bodies as a living wisdom-system, available to inform us in every moment. We treat our bodies like beasts of burden, or worse, like machines. We dull our emotions; we avoid the mess of sweat and blood; we place shame over our sexuality.

“Our culture fears all natural processes: birthing, dying, healing, living,” writes Christiane Northrup in Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. “Because our culture worships science and believes that it is ‘objective,’ we think that everything labeled ‘scientific’ must be true. But science as it is currently practiced is a cultural construct rife with all the biases of the culture in general.” One of those biases is against the body, the female body in particular, and all that it feels and senses.

“Ultimately,” she continues, “I’ve found it enormously empowering to realize that no scientific study can explain exactly how and why my own particular body acts the way it does. Only our connection with our own inner guidance and our emotions is reliable in the end. That is because we each comprise a multitude of processes that have never existed before and never will again.”

She goes on to say that our entire society “functions in ways that keep us out of touch with what we know and feel.”

In this societal view, we tend to think of our internal organs as refined machines that do a particular job. The heart pumps blood. The stomach digests food. The brain thinks. However our amazing bodies are an elegant sensing, intuiting, mystery-knowing organism. A relatively new field of neuroscience called ‘neurocardiology’ and ‘neurogastroenterology’ uncovers the actual brain-functioning of the heart and gut. Both have their own independent nervous system.

Back in the 1960s, research conducted by John and Beatrice Lacey—pioneers in the field of psychophysiology—showed that the heart has its own reasoning that is not determined by directives from the brain. Subsequent investigations revealed an actual pathway and mechanism allowing the heart to send influential messages to the brain. Neurocardiology research led to the development of the concept of the “heart brain” in 1991.

The heart at least 40,000 neurons, as many as are found in various subcortical centers in the brain. The heart and brain have a two-way communication and yet, between the two, it is the heart that has final influence over the brain and not, surprisingly, the other way around. The heart is actually a governing system of the body and brain function!

The stomach also fires off signals to the brain via its own extensive network of neurons. According to Michael Gershon, chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, there are 100 million neurons in this “second brain.” This arsenal far outnumbers the neuron supply in the spinal cord or the rest of the nervous system outside of the brain. So the stomach has plenty to tell the brain as well. Research shows that about 90% of the fibers in the vagus nerve—the main nerve for the gut—carry information from the gut to the brain.

Since the body—the part below the neck—has dominion over our discernment, attitudes, actions and decision making, it is time we start putting our presence and attention there. Listening to what those actual physical places in your body are ‘saying’ befriends how wisdom wants to be born inside you.

Joseph Campbell’s famous line ‘follow your bliss’ might better comprehended in a slightly less dramatic, more practical tone. ‘Go with what feels right’ might feel more graspable. It is an essential navigation tool moment to moment. My invitation to you is that you use it in parenting, in business, and in all relationships.

Invariably when I work with men and women to help them reclaim their sovereignty through their bodies’ knowing, someone always says, ‘but what if I’m wrong?’ It’s a worthy question. Fear of doing something wrong gets at the root of one of our greatest fears—doing something wrong, and because of it, I will be abandoned.

But consider for a moment, what if your body, and all of its legacy of wisdom, is trustworthy? We are told we are broken, damaged. That we were raised with attachment deficiencies, and therefore we cannot trust ourselves. And so we cling to data, formulas, cultural norms. But which would you rather trust, an elegantly synchronized anciently informed living cellular system, or a historically created fear-based mental construct?

Indeed, living from authentic wisdom instead of culturally accepted formulas, does require a radical vulnerability.

Here’s where community comes in. And when I say community, I don’t mean those caught in the cultural trance, who would only encourage you to ‘stay safe’, or ‘not rock the boat’. I mean a carefully cultivated group of people that you have created who are, like you, aspiring to walk through that cultural crack and claim a wisdom-informed life. Kindred is such a community. Wise friends who believe in you and really see you are such a community.

There’s a certain freedom with letting go of constructs. How free are we within it? How must space is there to truly be ourselves? To what extent can we play? Wisdom requires listening with both inwardly and outwardly directed ears that listen not for just any whim or urge, but for our deepest, highest, most soulful desires. People who really know us, our community, know those desires, and can reflect back to us if we have strayed off track.

Good friends cheer on our authentic, bold and wise selves, and encourage us to push past our comfort levels and explore new ground, but will be there with a raised eyebrow if we’ve hit some strange extreme.

In the 90s I spent a good while with an old Indian sage. He used to say it was important to ‘surround oneself with good company.’ He meant exactly this. Systems theory reveals that a system (for example, a friendship, family or company) is influenced, either positively or negatively, by its parts. But there is a kind of irresistible gravitational pull towards lower performance. For example, take a small class of adults—if the instructor’s expectations are that each person do their projects, and he or she upholds that expectation, the class will for the most part fall in line with that expectation.

If, however, one person does not do their project, and the instructor gives no overt consequences, then the entire class will begin to slide into the vortex of that low performance, in spite of their individual high standards. Over a few days, most will not complete their projects, regardless of their intention to succeed.

Systems are very powerful.

The same is true of the system of people with whom you surround yourself. If you surround yourself with lots of engaged, accountable, wise people, but also have a few not-so-wise around you, your life will remain compromised. It’s just physics. So get rid of the low hanging fruit (there’s only so many relationships you can honestly take care of).

But even a great community has its imperfections. That’s where the third part of the wisdom trinity comes in.

Spirit

Whether you call it God, Goddess, the universe, consciousness, life-force, mystery, higher power, or soul, it doesn’t matter. Something’s there, and that something is in concert, every moment, with you, as you. It abides in places that require conscious dedicated effort and discipline to access. And like any muscle, your spirit muscle has to be worked, and tended to, on a regular basis in order to strengthen its voice inside you.

This tending-to is called devotion.

Meditation, journaling, art, time in nature, solitude, prayer, poetry, dancing and music are all devotional practices. And they need time, but a special kind of time.

Something about our modern culture’s framing of time drives this artificial sense of emergency, which is at odds with creating space for devotional practice. We find ourselves in a widening gap between chronos and kairos—the ancient Greeks’ two words for time. The former refers to chronological or sequential time, and the latter signifies a time lapse, a moment of indeterminate time in which everything happens. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.

Chronos is a stopwatch. Kairos is a compass.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven, Ecclesiastes assures us. In other words, relax, it’s taken care of. We don’t have to be the guy at the control panel every second of the day. We can pause, we can let the greater mechanism at work handle things.

Kairos, meaning the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment), begs the question—right for whom? Therein lies the key, for the ‘rightness’ is governed by something more universal than your idea of how busy you are. As collateral damage in this modern age, its disappearance means we lose a kind of divine leverage.

Chronos feeds fear and data. Kairos feeds wisdom.

All this to say, you don’t need lots of time, the chronos kind of time, to have devotional practices. Five minutes of meditation, ten minutes of journaling, pausing after a phone call to drink in the sound of the birds—all of these moments allow you to hear a more subtle call.

Wisdom as Liberation 

If we are going to create a better world for ourselves and for our children, we have to take that leap into the unknown, away from efficiency, productivity, proof and data. We have to be willing to tap into that source of wisdom available in our bodies, in mature perceptive enlightened communities, and through practices that put us in touch with the mystery.

Wisdom is available to each and every one of us. It is our birthright. It is our imperative if we are going to survive. It is there, every minute, waiting for you patiently, waiting to be born through you. The ways in are numerous and, like all things mysterious, have no formula. So just start, start anywhere.

Dare to be different. Dare to follow your gut and your heart. Expect to be challenged and confronted. Expect for there to be onlookers, arms folded, their eyes behind sunglasses. But remember, just like the deer dancers of Ohkay Owingeh, all you need to do is listen.

Resources

Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The Biology of Transcendence, by Joseph Chilton Pearce

The Heartmath Solution, by Doc Childre

The Awakened Heart, by Gerald May

Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, by Christiane Northrup