The Imperative For Indigenous Wisdom To Inform Modern Psychedelic Therapies

Death is a place.

I learned this two years ago when I had a near-death experience, when I nearly died from a heart attack. It was a most profound experience, and it has deepened and broadened the work that I’ve been practicing for 40 years.

Maheo. Hana Maheo. Hananistaniwo. Hana Mucheo. Vixima.

My Cheyenne name is Vixima.

I’m Patricia James. I’m of Seminole lineage. Twenty-five years ago, I was adopted by a Cheyenne medicine man, Eugene Blackbear Sr., who trained me traditionally and initiated me as a pipe carrier and a Cheyenne priest.

During that time, I was also mentoring with Angeles Arrien, a Bay Area cultural anthropologist. The two of them were very important mentors to me and died two months apart from one another.

Before they died, they both told me to begin to identify as a medicine woman and to bring these teachings forward.

Traditional cultures spend a lot of time working in the realm of cycles, skill development, and the understanding of death, dying and transitions as the bridges between those cycles.

Traditional cultures have ceremonies, rituals and many ways of accessing nonordinary states of consciousness. It can be breath deprivation, dancing, chanting, singing, whatever it is.

It is developmental. It trains us to let go and also to move within the realms of these nonordinary states and bring the information and the teachings back.

Nonordinary states are the foundation for a lot of deep healing that occurs. It’s what I learned again in my near-death experience.

Death is a place. As it turns out, it’s a soul place.

There, I learned that I could go across the thresholds, that there are lessons to learn in that space, and that there is peace and presence, much of which I brought back with me.

I’m thrilled to be alive, and I’m grateful to have this opportunity to look at how we hold the process of the end of our lives.

Death can be the most intimate time of a person’s life, for ourselves and for someone else. It’s a time when healing comes, when we don’t know what that healing might bring.

So how can we be present?

In part, it’s going back to our practices, our skill development. How can we stay with the experiences that we learn and know that the work is the medicine, that all things are medicine, how we walk and how we live our lives, so that we can end well?

And we can remember that, as traditional people remind us, we come in on a breath and we leave on a breath.

Each day, we have death on one side and life on the other side, and we’re asked the question:

What are we going to do with that sweet, precious gift of our life?

May our collective dream be a healing one.