A River without Shores

A friend of mine asked me last Sunday about “meditative” or “contemplative” practices in Candomblé or Orisha practices in general and also asked about the nature of “possession” or “trance” that is such a notable hallmark of our tradition. I found this old piece I’d written and thought I’d post it.

Trance: A River without Shores

“Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you.” —Sheng-yen

Our ability to receive and give the Spirit, as well as our understanding of this process and what it means in our own lives, and in life’s wider breadth, begins as a trickle. It starts as the condensation of dew or the merciful dripping of rain and gathers in small pools at first, under leaves or in secret caves far underground. These are our dreams and yearnings, the Spirit’s soft balancing of our inner fears and thwarted needs; tenderly our seeds of hope are watered off-handedly with the generosity of the Spirit. Slowly this moistness gathers, grows, and begins a tentative flow. Small streams, curious conversations and questions, in rituals a sense of coming home, the finding of new friends and soul-mates, reading an inspiring text, or a sudden revelation, the Spirit begins. In all these little things, the Spirit gathers possibilities.  Streams flow and converge and Spirit becomes a stream but not without seemingly false, failed starts, or frustrations to the water’s flowing.  Sometimes the water appears to dry out, to disappear, but in reality just having sunk underground it will surface later as if some other stream altogether.  Sometimes the Spirit sits still and perfected in lakes and ponds, offering its grace of fish and water to all around. Sometimes she gushes forth as a spring out of the desert offering a miraculous and impossible salvation to us and everyone. Regardless, the Spirit flows and this movement is our source, our life.

In the trance that manifests during our rituals there is a particular convergence of the Spirit, another, unique place where waters meet. These trances are the blood of the Spirit and while watching the medium’s dance, gestures, and words we can feel its pulse. There pours forth from the presence of the Spirit in the trance a harmonious growth in the medium, the community, and the Spirit. It is a bonding, a commingling, and a wedding. Out of this union the Spirit flows, it births.  Yet each must be willing to give and receive, to surrender and to grow. This is the difficult work of our tradition. This is the lingering message sent to us, like a leaf in the wind or a stone from the bottom of the water: to be willing to give in order to open to a fuller blessing. “A full hand can grasp nothing more; only by giving can we receive.”

We speak at once of the Spirit and “the spirits.” When we speak of the Spirit in a singular, capitalized way, we speak of the unity of all being, the force, creativity and continuity that this implies. When we talk of spirits, plural and lower case, we speak of any of the myriad aspects of the Spirit, living and dead, historical or fictional, embodied or disembodied, abstract or imminent. In our tradition we have whole tribes of spirits that come to us in our rituals, each a wave of the infinite, ever connected, Water that encircles the globe. Each spirit unique while part of the singular, One, unique only to Itself. We are accused of idolatry and small-mindedness, but how can we not praise the Spirit in all its parts and manifestations? Is it for our ‘small minds’ to decide what is holy and what is not when the Spirit makes and unmakes all things? We do not judge the tides, merely learn to swim accordingly.

The medium’s work is to learn to give. For some, the art of giving in/to the trance may come quickly while for others it is a labor that can last a lifetime; it is a raindrop’s long path from mountain clouds to the ocean. There is also the splashing over of the flow within the ritual trance into the wider current of the medium’s every day life; it can be a slow permeation and gradual solution into the medium’s self, taking time to wash back into the community. With the spirit’s first seeping touch it starts with an inevitable grain of selfishness or vanity, shame or confusion. This is just the medium adjusting to a forgotten way of being. We become afraid for ourselves as we learn that things are not as we had thought: that we are not as we thought. We begin to understand that for our self to come into fullness, to live, for the Spirit to come forth and dance in our spirit, we have to give up what we have thought of as our self.  In some particular time and place we have to struggle to become willing and able to be washed away. It is natural to resist this process or to try to manipulate it or to fake it or to feel fake in our struggle to become real. It is also difficult to remain responsible unto and as our individual self, even as we wallow within and are infused by a greater, Spirit without boundary. What small child doesn’t cry when first taken to the river to swim? Even as we seek it out, the “me” centered self creeps about sabotaging our every effort to give, or so it seems at first. The trance then, in such moments, is struggle.  It should not be rushed or pushed, nor should it be avoided, trivialized, or put aside. There is no worry either way, the river carves its own banks and not even the densest, hardest stone remains a barrier to water’s constant push. The river is a warrior, and one that always wins.

As we experience the Spirit in trance we begin to feel the perennial nature of spirits’ approaches, becoming part of our “everyday.”  The ego gets used to the spirits coming and going and, relaxing, it begins to “stand back,” to give over more easily. As this occurs the spirits’ ability to pass through the medium, using, strengthening, firming, and nourishing the medium grows, while simultaneously doing the same to the community, and to the spirits themselves. We see this process throughout existence, in the interdependence of species within ecosystems, in the delicate functioning of cells within the body. The medium also usually learns here to take care of their body, mind and heart; with a new, healthier set of boundaries and commitments, she becomes mature and more capable of detached, equanimity and compassion. The river is a mother that cares for her children and these, in turn, care for her.

Initially, however, in the relationship between the medium and the spirit we see much fumbling as the medium and the spirits adjust to each other and eventually find their harmony. It is easy to see the mediums’ personal defects and foibles manifest in the alleged actions of the spirits as they begin to act through the medium. This should be gently accepted, almost ignored, countered by engaging both the spirit and medium appropriately, emphasizing their healthy manifestation in relationship to the community. This provides a challenge to the triad of medium/community/spirit and will always remain dynamic, even if eventually it eases into a more settled, productive relationship. We are reasonable to be afraid and only slowly become more willing to splash about in the water and eventually dive and swim, even attempting the Other Shore.

As the river approaches the sea her broad waist is beyond the eye’s ability to embrace her far banks. She is immense as she marches, the Amazon, the Niger, the Nile or the Mississippi, her watery waistline wide and impossible, fantastic.  We are like an infant in her belly, floating unaware. Even when born into her arms we will always feel almost powerless facing her relentless currents. Yet even she splinters and diverges, can sink and get lost in swamps before becoming wide, boundless ocean. Trance can seem to mystify and obscure, deluding and corrupting the Spirit’s integrity, yet in the end, it always arrives to the sea. Water pours into water as what was lost or looked over is found, cherished. We find that our self-attachment, our egotism, our fears, and our ignorance are all washed clear…that they are all silt carried by the water itself, used by the water to provide fertile ground, to move and establish banks, to carve and erode what stands in its way.

This is how the spirits move us and this is how we move within the Spirit, waves rising and sinking, emerging and immersing, full of so much filth gathered in the flooding yet carrying it away, purifying, becoming possible, fertile. Each wave is distinct and yet part of a whole beyond our mind’s briefest understanding, a drip of falling rain splattering into the continually evaporating ocean.