"The Path With Heart

I was asked to do a combined article for a website based on my previous three articles ‘The Call of the Ancestors’, ‘In search of My Lost Tribe’, and ‘When in search of the Higher Self Follow the Path of the Feelings’, I did not realise what a tall order that would be. I wrote ‘Tribe’ decades ago, ‘Higher Self’ years ago and ‘Ancestors’ much more recently. I have evolved and grown, and my work and my life reflect that.  Even so, it still feels true to me today.

I have worked with the concept of the Higher Self since 1984, when I began a study of Psychosynthesis to become a practitioner. It sat well with me. The idea of an intermediary between my personal self and the greater Universal Oneness gave me options that everyday thinking had not. As I worked in practice with clients, I quickly found that the Higher Self contact was usually initiated through feelings. Now, as most of us are encouraged to view our feelings as inferior, immature aspects of ourselves that need to be suppressed, this was a huge breakthrough. It changed the entire focus of the way I practiced. Instead of emotional release coming as a side affect of mind work, I began directing my attention towards the way the client felt, and away from the intellect, asking them to ‘feel’ not to ‘think’.

I found the directed release of the inner tension from deeply held trauma, caused by ignoring these inner messages, cleared a path that enabled access to wisdom and higher understanding to flow. I began to understand the place of importance emotions have in our makeup: that of energy vibrations that provide us with vital feedback from both the outer environment, and our inner world.  It became quite clear that emotions were in direct touch with our needs, and that to be able to effectively meet these needs and empower ourselves, we must listen to them. That requires a clearing of the backlog of unmet needs clogging up our psyche since childhood. Once that is recognised and commenced, we are able to weed out past reactive emotions from those that are currently informing us of actions that need to be taken to bring ourselves to and maintain ourselves in, balance. Therapy became a two fold process: clearing the past emotions and heeding the present ones. Indeed, all feelings are waves of energy, no matter if they are categorised as inspiration, intuition, or the more direct experiences of the big four: sad, glad, mad, and afraid. They are all telling us where to look for the information without which our evolution will be inhibited.

Walking my own talk, years of communication with my feelings lead me to discover an answer to a question that had plagued me for decades: the psychological importance, or not, of our genetic inheritance. I had long felt a displacement inside, like a longing and loneliness for something deeper than personal relationships.  Returning, after 5 years to Australia where my family had emigrated from England in the late 50’s, brought up feelings about leaving that land that I did not understand. I missed it but didn’t quite know why. It initiated a self search for their genesis. Was it the cultural difference? Was it the landscape? Was it the people?

I eventually realised that this longing was much deeper than I imagined. It stemmed from ways of being that the local indigenous people understood, though my Caucasian neighbours did not: we are connected to our land, our ancestry and our progeny through our DNA. That connection lasts beyond time. Actually, most of the Caucasian diaspora around me were hard put to know their parents well, let alone their more distant ancestors. So was it about race? Yes and no. It wasn’t some sort of superiority complex that is often expressed by insecure individuals feeling threatened by the existence of diversity in the human gene pool.

Actually, it was about belonging, and led to a greater understanding of its importance  in the lives of all people. I began to realise that we are in a particular race/tribe/family because that gives us just the right genetic environment and psychological history to provide us with the fodder for growth and development in a certain direction. That is the path we need to follow to be who we came here to be. I also found out that I was following a theme that was inherent within the path of my ‘people’. It was now ‘my watch’ and I needed to find the next piece in the jigsaw puzzle that was my tribe’s responsibility.

What was that?? Once again, as I followed my feelings I became aware of a fascination I had had with Boudica, the Celtic Warrior Queen, since primary school. She had cropped up as an example of female strength in the face of adversity many times, bring me support and ideas that were not found in the women of my immediate family. Had not done so for many generations.

It wasn’t until I began a course of Te Reo Maori language a few years ago that the greater implications of this discovery became clear. We were asked to do what is known as a pepeha. That is, a statement of our linage (whakapapa) as part of a welcome, introducing ourselves to other groups. Most of the Pakeha (non-Maori) students had no idea and some of the attempts at meeting this requirement were very interesting. Most referred to themselves as Ngati Pakeha (the white tribe) that was popularised by the historian Michael King in his own book about the subject of the place of white settlers in New Zealand history.

I, however, had a strange tingling up my spine and a voice inside my head that was in affect saying “Acknowledge me, Daughter” and I knew from whom it came. So with great trepidation I stood up and whakapapa’ed myself to the great queen. She was my tepuna. Her lands were the land that my family was born in as far back as the 1600’s when the records became unreadable. She may not have been a direct line, but as a Waitaha mentor commented, “She’s definitely an Aunty”.

And so it was that a dialogue began between me and my tepuna. I have been told that it is the job of myself and my generation to finish what she started back in 76 A.D: to take the people back to the sustainable ways lived before the capitalist colonisation by the Roman Empire began. She fought so hard to defeat it in our lands, but it eventually spread worldwide, becoming the beginning of the corporate world in which we now live. She tells me that my weapon is not the sword as was hers, but the words. Just put the ‘s’ in a different place.

I do what I am best at. I speak and write about that which I have had the privilege to be shown, so that I might help people honour the work that their ancestors began long ago, thus completing the cycle, allowing us to move forward from the past, and ‘know ourselves for the first time’.

Jay (Sparrowhawk) Ray is author of two books: “Reweaving the Web-A Shamanic Journey of Connection”, and “The Way Through-A Guide to Psychosynthesis in Everyday Life”.