Modern Medicine: A Life of Balance, Beauty and Harmony

By Wes Hamil

Modern Medicine is an entertaining how-to on utilizing the teaching of a specific Medicine Wheel in order to better understand who we are and how we function in the world. Self-governance, which refers to the way we conduct ourselves and our self-perception, is explored through teachings and personal ceremonies. Find inner peace, harmony, and your life's purpose within the pages of Modern Medicine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733759311

Book preview

Introduction

Introduction

Welcome to Modern Medicine. The information in this book is neither particularly modern, nor is it medicine in the pharmaceutical sense. It is a path to personal balance and presence. The book title reflects my slightly dry sense of humor, which is my natural tendency. My name is Wes Hamil, and the material that I am sharing in this book reflects my experience with more than a quarter-century of practicing these techniques. You can learn more about how I came to find these teachings in my spiritual memoir White Man Red Road.​

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Modern Medicine is divided into three sections. Each section builds on the preceding section and offers a way to for you to create a more balanced and present life. ​

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The first section reveals the eight aspects (defined through eight directions) of what it means to be human and provides a way to seek balance with each of those attributes. ​

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The second section provides a practice for communicating outwardly with Creation around us and listening to whatever responses we may receive.​

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The third section incorporates the teachings of the first two sections and provides a way to integrate what we have experienced as we engage with the process of life. ​

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This section offers a specific practice to confront the most fundamental human impediments to balance and to transform those relationships.​

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We live in modern times that are punctuated with the demands and pressures of all those things with which we have filled our lives. It is so easy to lose perspective and balance with who we really are as we attempt to prioritize and navigate this journey we have chosen. We need a personal medicine, a practice, to help us regain our balance in the midst of a world that comes at us from all directions.​

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That is the purpose of this book. We will apply a simple circle and some straightforward concepts and we learn to see ourselves reflected in those things. We then may choose to take what we see and embrace an authentic and balanced life.​

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Let’s step on to the road of that process together. Let’s begin now.

Chapter 6

Our Medicine Wheel

The following illustration depicts a simple circle. This circle is the wheel of our life. It is a wheel of being human. Each one of the eight elements that makes us human is shown along with the direction that it is located in within our wheel.

From this wheel, we will learn about the aspects of who we are and how to find balance.​

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Like all wheels, the place of perfect balance resides directly in the center of the circle. The wheel of a human life is no different.

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Our lives can be in balance only when we place ourselves right in the center of these eight directions. We need to learn what it is to be at the midpoint of each of these directions. But how exactly will we do that?

We will learn how to find the center of our circle by exploring who we are in each of these directions. As we gain insight into how each element of who we are functions within our life, we then will learn how the rest of the directions of this circle can be used to create balance.​

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Each direction in our wheel has a counterbalancing teaching in direct opposition. Each direction has equal weight and power in relation to the others. ​

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This wheel will show us how to look across our circle from whatever direction in which we find ourselves. As we look across this circle, we will see a reflection of the teaching and attributes we need to embrace in order to move back to the center of our life journey. ​

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The gift of this practice will be to find balance. This gift is the first of many we will receive. More blessings will come our way as we learn this process of self-balance. These rewards will include a healthy relationship with ourselves and the world around us. ​

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These relationships invariably will deepen the rich potential that exists within each one of us to more fully experience who we are.​

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So, let’s start exploring the eight directions of being human. Our journey starts in the South.

Chapter 7

The South

The South of our wheel is the direction of our emotions. It is represented by the element of water. It is a place of trust and innocence and is associated with the color red.​

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Our emotional state governs a great deal of how most of us behave in life. One way or another, we react to our emotions with behavior. We may sublimate our emotions as much as possible and react in a controlled fashion. We may be expansive and react viscerally to what we feel with behaviors that are somewhat exaggerated. Many of us will demonstrate a mix of both extremes and more tempered responses. All of us are subject on some level to the effects created by our emotional state. ​

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Typically, our emotions are susceptible to the influence of our environment. We find ourselves in situations that stress us out. We seek circumstances that make us feel mellow and enable us to relax. ​

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In this respect, our emotions are like water. They are fluid and can take the form of our environment. Our emotions are affected by stimuli the same way water is affected by heat or cold. Water heated to the boiling point changes to steam. We used to say someone who was upset or angry was steamed. ​

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Emotions that are denied and subsequently managed in such a way that we will not allow ourselves to feel them fully become like water that has been frozen. Our emotional temperament becomes icy and frigid.​

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In both of these examples, we are experiencing what it means to be out of balance and living as a hostage to our emotions. ​

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A common emotion lies at the core of these two examples. This emotion can be found at the base of almost every situation in which we find we are camped solidly in the South of our Human Medicine Wheel.​

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This emotion is fear. Fear has an extensive wardrobe and often will appear dressed as anxiety. Fear rarely travels alone and is fond of bringing denial as its companion.​

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The better we get at telling ourselves the truth about what we feel the more clever fear becomes with its disguises. ​

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Fear thrives in the dark. When we are willing to acknowledge our fears, we can confront them and take action to deal with them. This brings fear out into the light of objectivity. This light of objectivity may not eliminate the fear, but it will provide us with a way to determine just how valid the fear in fact is. It also will help us to see how big the fear really is as opposed to how big it feels. We are going to explore exactly how to find this objectivity in the next chapter.​

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The easiest way to know that we have become a hostage to our emotions is when what we feel has become the sole governor of our life. When all of our behaviors and decisions are dictated by either what we feel or are trying to avoid feeling, then we have become out of balance. When we demonstrate a lack of respect for the other aspects of who we are, and instead base our lives strictly on the management of our emotions, we are unbalanced. In this case, we need a new direction to engage.​

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Before we look at the next direction in our circle, we need to examine one more aspect that composes the South. We have stated that the South is the place of trust and innocence. This phrase conjures up images of childhood. Childhood may be the last time any of us can remember experiencing a sense of innocence. We often develop our emotional ideas about what trust felt like during this early time in our lives.​

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Here is what we need to recognize about this childlike trust and innocence: at some specific time in our lives, our emotions were simply emotions. We felt them in real time and acknowledged them. We may not have had a vocabulary to articulate them. We likely as not had a limited range of behavioral responses to them. The critical thing about this time in our lives is that we were present with our feelings as they occurred. Our state of trust and innocence allowed us to experience our emotions and acknowledge them. ​

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To be honest with ourselves about whatever we are feeling, we need to reclaim some of that trust and innocence. In so doing, we can honor the truth that our emotions are an essential component of who we are and what we need to feel.

When we are living in a balanced way with our emotions we can enjoy them as the gift they are intended to be. ​

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We have a tool in our Medicine Wheel to help us with the perceived consequences we are so quick to project upon our feelings. This tool will enable us to migrate from the South of our Medicine Wheel, where we have been clouded by our feelings and how we have learned to manage them.​

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We will sit in the South of our wheel and look across the circle to the North, where we will find another element of our humanness ready to aid in this journey to balance.​

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Let’s take a few steps toward the center of our circle and head North.

CHAPTER 6

The North

The North of our Medicine Wheel is the direction of our intellect. It is represented by the element of wind and the place of wisdom and logic. It is associated with the color white.

When we use our intellect in a balanced way, it becomes a tremendous tool for objectivity and perspective. It can serve as the wind that blows away the clouds of emotional steam in which we often feel engulfed.

We also can allow ourselves to become trapped in our intellect when we fail to use it for its intended purpose. Each direction in our wheel is meant to complement the others. It can be easy to replace the behaviors