Making wolves howl.
I’ve related this quick story elsewhere (I think it was in a response to a Medium article about Standing Rock) but it bears repeating in relation to your article, Aura Wilming .
Back in the late 1980s I was studying Lakota spirituality with a small group of people in New Mexico. In addition to actual studies and the reading of numerous books, I participated in real-life spiritual rituals, including experiencing scores of sweat lodges, a very important part of Lakota spirituality.
Our little group of nine included a pipe-carrier who had apprenticed through the Black Elk lineage before becoming an official pipe-carrier. He is the one who conducted the sweat lodge ceremonies. His wife is the one who taught us the Lakota traditions and songs (songs are very important).
Each weekend we would meet in a camp out in the desert. The sweat lodge and camp was situated in a little valley between two hills covered with pinon pine, yucca, chamisa, and cacti. On the other side of one of those hills was a wolf refuge. The nature-loving biologists who ran the refuge rescued wolves and wolf hybrid dogs who had been abandoned by humans who tried to make pets out of them. Behind fenced enclosures there were a couple dozen wolves and wolf hybrids. Along with the whooping crane, the gray wolf is one of my totem animals (for those who believe in such things) so I visited the refuge several times. To be in the company of wolves was, for me, beyond ecstatic.
A sweat lodge is a circular structure built out of all natural materials. In the middle inside the structure is a small pit dug into the earth. Extremely hot rocks that had been baking in a bonfire are placed into the small pit. The leader of the sweat lodge sprinkles water over the rocks to produce an unbearable steam. (Saunas are utterly tame compared to a sweat lodge.)
It gets so unbearably hot and steamy inside the sweat lodge that to endure it one must step out of physicality into the spirit realms where heat is not felt. The goal is to enter trance-like states beyond our everyday consciousness.
Our pipe-carrier taught us a technique to amplify and direction unconditional love energy. While sitting on the ground around the pit in the sweat lodge in a heightened state of awareness we were told to hold hands with the people on either side of us in our little circle of nine humans. With eyes closed, we were told to visualize a powerful torrent of white light flowing in a clockwise direction through the circle of connected hands.
This is a process of amplification. What does it amplify? It amplifies the thoughts and feelings of those humans the energy was passing through. We were then told to visualize the wolves at the refuge on the other side of the hill. We were to see them inside the circle of light and we were then to look at them very intently and bathe them with all the unconditional love we could muster in our hearts.
When we did this the wolves commenced howling. With a couple dozen wolves all howling together we could easily hear them in our sweat lodge the next valley over. We could probably have heard them if we were five valleys over. The sound of wolves howling is one of the most incredibly euphoric sounds on this planet.
Did we make the wolves howl? Did they howl in response to the love energy we were sending them? Howling is an expression of joy for wolves. Or was it just a coincidence that they started howling just as we sent them thoughts and feelings of love and joy using the group amplification process?
Well, it is certainly possible that it was a coincidence. But over the course of that summer we repeated the same exercise of directioning our unconditional love energy towards the wolves while in a sweat lodge over 30 times and EVERY SINGLE TIME the wolves responded with group howling. Every single time. Could all 30+ times be a coincidence?
All I’m saying is that we should never underestimate the power of unconditional love. Unconditional love transforms all things. And we certainly should not underestimate the power of collective, amplified unconditional love.
As for my opinions on Madame X, that would require its own very lengthy response which I am not at the moment inclined to delve into.
