A number of things have changed since I first dreamed up that workshop. For one thing, fewer White people are asking, “Wasn’t that all solved by the Civil Rights Movement?” For another, and this is big, back then most of the practices I was including in the workshop were proprietary, esoteric, and kept under wraps. People didn’t want to share, especially if they were making money from them; at the very least, you’d have to attend a pricey workshop to learn one or two here or there. Now they’re all over the Internet, and in all kinds of books, and it’s more like the scene in the Lenny Henry BBC comedy series Chef! in which the chief chef, played by Henry, after spending his day off perfecting a salmon mousse, has arrived triumphantly at work the next day with his culinary masterpiece. The second chef very naturally asks, “Will you show me how it’s done?” The answer, of course, is “No,” and after a bit of back and forth, the chef declares, “There is no one on this planet I will tell! When I die, that mousse dies with me!” And then a moment later, when he starts to rush off for a key ingredient for something else, the second chef asks, “What about the salmon mousse?”, and the chef says, “Oh, you could do that—I’ll show you how it’s done.”
This book aims to be along the lines of “Oh, you could do that—I’ll show you how it’s done.” It loosely follows the structure of the workshop I designed all those years ago, with a few additions, and the advantage that you can skip around and find what works best for you, or be inspired to come up with something new—you don’t have to drop everything and not go a page farther until after you’ve completed a practice. You can read straight through without stopping to try a thing, and then decide where you want to go from there, which might even be a practice that isn’t included here. You can take your time assimilating new insights before moving on from one practice to another, which might be better for some than a weekend workshop; we are, after all, organic beings, and we grow organically, over time. I’ve described some of what has come up for me in the course of doing this work, to make it clear that I’m not being theoretical here: as Don Durito de la Lacandona so wisely said, the problem with reality is that it doesn’t know anything about theories. My experiences may be helpful, though not necessarily a guide for everyone: everyone is different, spiritual work is experiential, and the only spiritual experience that is valid for you is your own.
Some of these practices work quickly, while others may take you one related insight at a time. Years ago, at a workshop on shamanic practices, one of the facilitators noted that although in many times and places a shaman might spend days drumming or under the influence of a plant substance in order to make a shamanic journey, nowadays we may journey for a matter of minutes. “The spirits seem to know that we’re in a hurry,” he said. This is true: we are. Very few of us have a whole other lifetime to spend undoing a lifetime of conditioning. We don’t have a whole lot of time to get over ourselves if we want to survive and live well in this world. And while this little book may be just a start, we have to start somewhere.
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