Quantum Life Bodywork News

About six weeks ago, I was asked by Liz Thompson, the director of the Sharing Stories project, if it would be possible for me to visit a widely known and respected song man and Elder of the Waagilaak of Eastern Arnhem Land, Roy Ashley. The co-director of the project, Gavin, had recently driven Mr Ashley to a funeral as he holds an important ceremonial position in the singing of funeral songs, which is to say songs to guide spirits to their proper place after they pass away. In that journey Gavin had the chance to speak at length with Mr Ashley.

Mr Ashley’s physical health was in rapid decline, and this had been noted by both Gavin and Liz. Both were aware that something of the decline was unable to be addressed with Western medicine.

There was a recognition, in subsequent discussions between Gavin, Liz and myself, of a degree of urgency and so I decided to make the journey in the immediacy, despite being unfunded. Although I was aware there would be no finacial payment for my work, in the preparations for that journey I did make a call to a number of directions for financial support to cover the not insignificant costs of that journey.

There is certainly much more to say on this subject, but the immediate intent of this post is to offer thanks to all those who did generously offer that support. The desired outcome in the immediacy was achieved, with Mr Ashley’s condition significantly improved by the time of my departure. Whilst I was there, I asked him to say a few words to those who’s contributions went some way towards the recouping of my costs to get to he.

I’ll let him speak, then, for himself.

Roy Ashley – Legendary Waagilak songman offers thanks for assistance from Quantum Life Studios on Vimeo.

My own thanks go to Liz and Gavin for clearly seeing a need, and acting upon that, despite the lack of a cultural framework to guide the process they were suggesting, and not inconsiderable obstacles to it’s achievement. Thanks to they also for their material and emotional support in the process, and their personal commitment to relationship with Roy that informed that.

Thanks to Corrie for her most generous financial support that made the initial booking of flights an easier leap to make, as well as her ongoing energetic support throughout the process. Thanks to Homelands Community, particularly to Lucas and Maya who took my request for support to the community, and their financial and emotional support for the process. Thanks to Karen and the Canadian Jungian community, to Teresa and all the other supporters who live outside of this land, but recognise the importance of Mr Ashley and those like him who hold song and power therein contained, which is intricately and importantly concerned with the health of the Earth as a whole. Thanks to Eric, Carmer, Georgie and Heather and Barry who also contributed in financial support, and to Alison who also offered most generously financially and energetically in support of the endeavour. Thanks to Simon who made the process smoother in his support thereof on a number of levels . Thanks to Phil at Budget Darwin who enabled a reduced rate for our movement around this wide, brown land. Thanks to Tony and Lynda for their material support by way of nutritional medicines for Roy. A thousand thankyou’s also to Jo and Ruby, who’s commitment to support of me in right action, regardless of reward, allows me the possibility to fulfil my responsibilities for healing in the world.

Despite considerably generosity, some of the costs remain unmet and any further support which can be offered will be gratefully received. A donation button is available to the right side of the page here.

UPDATE: [please note that this link has been removed on account of Paypal's seizure of my all of my funds in my Paypal account months after receiving a few hundred dollars in donations in support of Roy's healing. The reason they purport to have done this is because of "Australian and Global" Counter Terrorism and Money Laundering legislation. I will be writing more of this issue, but will leave the reader to their own conclusions as to the real reasons behind this action]

Obviously the assistance of one man, regardless of how much information he holds, goes a very small way towards addressing the massive health issues facing indigenous Australia. What this small success, does highlight is that there are broad gaps between traditional medical sciences and those offered by the modern Western medical system in Australia, and that those gaps can in some way be bridged by the sharing of other traditional healing sciences. Not only that, it highlights the fact that an effective dialogue regarding these issues is possible between European and indigenous Australia.

I have some time been in dialogue with a French medical doctor who operates a clinic which bridges modern and traditional sciences effectively and specifically for the treatment of addictions in Peru. He has relationship with both the Plant Medicines of South America, and the Western Medical system. He has expressed interest in the possibility of a cultural exchange process between Curanderos in South America and Traditional Healers in Australia. As his system has proved successful for both Europeans and Indegenous people in the South American context, so to does it offer the possibility of a dynamic and ongoing relationship of curing and learning for Indigenous Australians. I have already been in dialogue with a young Indigenous leader and Maparntjarra, who has experienced profound healing on a personal and ancestral level with the aid of the Plant Medicines revered in South America and in a similar context to that to which I am referring.

There is some political sensitivity in an Australian of European descent endeavouring to facilitate processes related to indigenous healing and yet clearly I am in a unique position to assist in this manner as I am recognised as Curandero by colleagues in South America and as Marngitj and Maparntjarra by Elders in this land. Clearly there is much dialogue to be had with other Marngitj, Maparntjarra and Nankari of this land to determine interest in and perceived efficacy of such a program. I personally have been working towards this process from many years, establishing relationship, developing trust, demonstratig capacity and envisaging structure. Slowy what began as a germ of a seed, is taking root, gaining vigour and showing itself as a viable evolutionary proces. That process now needs the support of othes to help it grow.

Clearly the journey I have described above has been a rewarding one on many levels, and a fine indication of the efficacy of cultural exchange. I will be grateful for any offers of assistance received, in whatever form. Contributions received once costs for recent journey have been covered will be turned towards the nurturing of the ongoing process of the the realisation of gathering between traditional Indigenous Healers of Australia and South America with a view to facilitating cultural exchange in the realm of healing.

In an age of viral media sent moments after it’s capture, it was an interesting experience to be engaged in the crafting of a modern radio documentary feature. Over three weeks work in the ABC studios, as well of 100 s of hours of collecting, collating and editing material by Liz and myself.

Despite script compromises to allow broadcast in that particular manner, and a name I would not have chosen myself, I am pleased with the end result. I feel most comfortable in oral culture’s but I think this piece makes a worthwhile contribution to aural culture, and hope people will continue to find a richness in it which contrasts the banality of much of that which washes through the ever broadening media ocean.

When I launched my website some years ago I expressed on the home page

“Quantum Life Bodyworks draws on a vast array of technologies, from those of archaic shamanism to hyper-modern media manipulation, manual body therapies and entheogenic ecstasies.”

This program is another step in that project’s realisation, and I am heartened that in the nations where the direct experience of the spirits of the Plant Medicines is prohibited, the spirit of the Plant Medicines can still touch the hearts of the people.

Big thanks to Liz Thompson, Robyn Ravlich, Robyn Johnston, and Judy Rapley [amongst many others unnamed] for making this possible.

The program is available to stream or to download here. Additionally a number of visual vignettes edited by myself and conceived, directed produced and shot by Liz Thompson and I are here and here available for your viewing pleasure.

In the course of my day many thoughts and ideas arise, most of which I would like to share and I mentally file these for later expression. As is evidenced by the paucity of posts by me in the last 12 months, this strategy has not been particularly effective. One result of the observation of this is the acknowledgement that I act most effectively in the moment, and that long term planning is definitively not my forte. To this end, I am experimenting with a strategy of posting as thoughts and ideas arise, or as near as possible as is practicable.

Bear with me in this.

So, today I am inspired by the magnitude of possibility. Yesteday I attended to some clients that a friend in the Sacred Valley asked me to see. The actuality of their situations may be told at a later date, but suffice to say that both had been pronounced incurable by the medical systems available here to them and, whilst for many Peruvians the quality of medical treatment available is poor, the same diagnosis would probably have been made in Australia.

One of these clients has been resigned to her fate for some 10 years, and yet in 2 short visits over the course of a couple of weeks those around her have witnessed more change than in the prior decade. I am not offering this for the purpose of self aggrandisement, as I firmly believe such healings are a matter of grace, a confluence of events and people, a matter of right place and time. Nonetheless I feel that there are mechanisms at play which, if explored from a variety of perspectives, would offer much to our develpment of a more sophisticated language with which to point towards healing.

In both of these instances it is obvious that a large part of the capacity to effect change came about by virtue of my capacity to communicate non verbally, as neither of these individuals had, at that time, the capacity to communicate verbally. Probably the most common explanation of this manner of communication would be to refer to words such as clairaudience or telepathy, which may or may not be the case, but I find the common language available in this instance limiting and divisive because both have a pejorative weighting and are not seen as particularly applicable to “real world” curing.

Now obviously the real world is a culturally bound perspective, but there is quite obviously a weight given to the cultural perspective that we in modern western “democracies” adhere to. That this is so was clearly evidenced to me yesterday as I arrived at the small Peruvian town in which my clients lived. Just past the adobe gate to the town was a monstrous billboard which announced, in English, “Cash Available, ATM next left”. Said ATM dispenses US dollars in a region where many live on two or three such dollars a day. US consumer culture is blatantly obvious here, and even by those who cannot afford to participate in it is considered some kind of natural progression. The cultural, economic and environmental cost of this is pronounced.

Here is Wade Davis‘ perspective on such matters.

I can say that the healing afforded these people was a result of grace, and the assistance and direction of the Apus and Pachamamas, the spirits of nature, and celestial sentient beings, which indeed it was, and those who were witness to the events would concur that the winds assisted and the material realm was demonstrably altered by the processes of consciousness enacted therin, but that will not afford me much credibility if I want the cooperation of a mental health research institute in Florida. Nor in fact should it, because I am not Q’ero, am not Chinchero. My genes come from different continents, and my cultural antecedents are worlds apart from those who have for centuries cultivated relationships with the spirits of the mountains and of the elements. I cannot don the intricate weavings of a Q’ero p’aqo, take an initiation and expect to have mystical powers conferred upon me, but I am not so chauvenistic in the house [as it were] of these spirits to suggest that they are a fiction and because I do not believe in them, that they do not exist.

What I am suggesting, however, is that the suffering of two people people was alleviated by seemingly inexplicable means, the whistling of haunting tunes, waving of feathers and blowing of tobacco. In my view this has to be a good thing, and we could afford to spend more time and effort examining how to do this on a much broader scale than I am able to as one individual. In fact, it may be as Davis suggests, that the thoughtful (as opposed to romantic or fanciful) examination of the wisdom of other cultures that, along with our own culture’s technological wizardry, offers us a way through the rather dire mess we as a species find ourselves in on a planetary scale.

My remuneration for my day’s work was a small bottle of water offered by a grateful father [and produced by Coca Cola] and, as I say, the resulting joy and inspiration that such results offered me. I came home and, in the course of subsequent communications stumbled upon this statistic.

I am not suggesting that indigenous cultures are perfect, far from it, nor am I denying my enjoyment of the health and material prosperity which my modern culture offers me, but I am suggesting, as the picture above shows in no uncertain terms, that something is completely and utterly out of whack! If this is representative of a Darwinian evolution of cultural process, if modern western culture is, as Fukuyama suggested some time back, the end of history, then I think perhaps it will be.

I have seen many people come to disappointing realisations about the motivations and idealogies of mestizo curanderos in the last months, and I myself am under no illusions about the nature in which much old knowledge is applied today in Peru. Nor am I under any illusions about my own frailties or limitations, but equally I am not limiting my capacities to conform to a particular cultural framework. Whilst it is so that the old people, the carriers of wisdom in indigenous cultures have much to offer we in the West, so too have we much to offer their cultures insofar as manners in which they can limit the destructive elements of this culture which now touches every inch of the planet, and at an ever increasing pace. Rather than suggest that we can do nothing about the inexorable onslaught of totalitarianism, social surveillance and control, war and ecological and cultural destruction, let us set about building new cultural identities, new languages that reflect our experiences of possibility, not of limitation.

I do not know what to do, other than that which I do, but I am interested in mature, collective discussion about what to do, and I hold great hope for the bringing to the fore the noblest aspects of the human spirit.