Contents Introduction The Unknown The Self The Psychic Split Being With the Negativity The Community Truthspeaking and the Circle Talk Personal Responsibility Banishment Synthesis Conclusion Comments

 

Introduction

There’s no place quite like the Teaching Drum Outdoor School.

For over ten years now, under the guidance of Tamarack Song, the school has offered its unique Wilderness Guide Program, a program unlike any other that I’m aware of, one that takes people from a life in civilization and casts them into the woods for one year, to live and learn from that best of teachers: experience. That includes the experience of nature itself, the experience of one’s own raw struggles, and the experience of living intimately with a small community.

There are a few other primitive skills opportunities out there that are in the same general field, all with different focuses. I don’t have much experience or contact with any of these others, but my sense is that, still, Teaching Drum is rather unique in that it focuses not only on skills or philosophy, but on building culture and relationship skills. In essence, it is, or attempts to be, more of a “complete” experience, aiming to align the student, mind and body and soul, to the Old Way.

When I took it in 2001-2002 (anyone who’s unfamiliar with my story can read a summary here), it was in its third year, and we were, at eleven people, by far the largest group to have committed to the yearlong. Since then, many students have come and gone, and many have gotten a lot of growth from the program.

Elsewhere on this blog I’ve described extensively many of the struggles I had at Teaching Drum, and many I continued to have after leaving. What I have largely left untouched is the fact that I was hardly alone in the types of things I was feeling. I haven’t returned to visit since 2003, but I’ve continued to have periodic contact with people associated with the school, and in doing so I’ve noticed that, year after year, for most people there have been similar issues, which leads me to believe that the problem is not individual (or rather, not only individual), but systemic. Among all of the positives that result from taking the yearlong, I also observe that many people emerge feeling exhausted, guilty, conflicted, and with an increased addiction to food and various other substances. Many don’t make it at all, and drop out after a week, a month, or six months.

In this article, I’d like to offer what is hopefully a constructive critique of some of the causes of these problems. Although the experience I had in the yearlong was enriching, what I have come to realize is that it also carried danger, and these dangers have manifested as physical, emotional, and mental health problems among myself and other students.

My purpose for writing this is partly therapeutic, as this sort of critique helps me to explain my negative experiences in a more objective and verifiable manner than I’ve attempted in the past; and partly in hopes that it will inform other people who seek to undertake or administer this program or one like it, so that they can improve on, avoid, or at least take into account the shortcomings of such an approach.

I will discuss three broad areas in which I believe the Wilderness Guide Program potentially endangers its students. The dangers accompany the engagement of and interaction with:

1. The Unknown
2. The Self
3. The Community

 

The Unknown

If we are going to rediscover what it is to be human and re-engender the Lifeway of Balance, do we not need to turn our backs on town, heal through what keeps dragging us back to town, and relearn how to find the comforts of town in the sweet milk of The Mother’s bosom? … As of now, the only way I know that works is to embrace fear, let the tears flow, and summon the courage and tenacity of the Guardian-Warrior.

— Tamarack Song

Anyone who spends time at the Teaching Drum Outdoor School quickly discovers that Town is a place of great significance.

The house and property where the camp staff and support crew live lie about five miles away from the town of Three Lakes, in a semi-rural residential area. Five miles farther, down a dirt road, is Nishnajida, the 80-acre parcel in the Nicolet National Forest, abutting the beautiful little Woodbury Lake, where the Wilderness Guide Program takes place.

The total physical distance from Nishnajida to Three Lakes is ten miles. The total cultural and psychological distance is far more vast.

Tamarack’s quote above describes an essential aspect of the program, which is immersion. By immersing oneself deeply in an experience, rather than taking weekend or weeklong workshops, one can reach far deeper levels. The yearlong immerses people in a wilderness environment and forces them to do everything in it.

When you sign up for the Wilderness Guide Program, you take only the things on your approved list of equipment, and you hike out into the middle of Nishnajida, where you spend the year with a group of strangers from all walks of life. You sleep in a tent or in a primitive lodge. You bathe, without soap, in the nearby lake. You do laundry, without soap, in the lake. You learn to drink water from the lake. You pee outside. When you have to take a shit, you go to your own “da’i” spot—your own personal dump territory, you squat, you do your business, and you wipe with sphagnum moss, dead fern leaves, or whatever else is convenient.

You learn to make your fires by friction, and from this you get your heat and your cooking. Your food is purchased from town by program assistants, and brought in periodically. You begin the process of identifying and eating wild greens, and, sometimes, trapping small animals. Larger animals, usually roadkill deer, are brought in for you to butcher and eat. You tan their hides, eventually to make clothing.

You are, essentially, in another world.

Prepare yourself as though you were going not just to another country, but to a far-off planet. This experience will be that radically different for you—it will be like nothing you’ve known before. Because of that, you will be tempted—severely at times—to call it quits. Come with the attitude that, come hell or high water, you’re going to stick it out. Giving is receiving: the only way you’re going to fully gain from this experience is to fully experience it.

You will not have access to anything you are accustomed to—family, loved ones, and familiar foods, comforts, and recreational activities. Please get your personal affairs in order before you arrive, so that you have no outside distractions during the year, such as financial or family matters, or where you might be working after the course concludes. Please arrange your financial matters so that you will not have to go to town to the bank.

Warn your family and friends, even if they live close by, that you will be gone for the year—you will be as inaccessible as though you were off on a stint with the Peace Corps.

— Excerpt from the Wilderness Guide Program acceptance letter, 2003

In situations where people find themselves thrown into the unknown, there’s an inevitable grasping at the familiar. People lose all of their ordinary points of reference and must either discover new ones or retreat to reconnect with familiar ones. The Teaching Drum language describes various stages or “thresholds” past which each person must go in order to progress. To do this, they draw upon the archetype of the warrior (the Guardian-Warrior, as they term it), something very relevant to more than just woodspeople. Learning to expand oneself into the unknown is a very important life skill.

In Craft of the Warrior, a synthesis of spiritual warrior approaches including Feldenkrais, Shambhala, Castaneda, and Neurolinguistic Programming, Robert Spencer writes,

The warrior welcomes the contact with the unknown as an opportunity for learning and for increasing personal power. The average person seeks the comfort of what she already knows and abhors the confused feelings that come from entering the unknown realms. The warrior, on the other hand, not only tolerates the unknown, but seeks it.

What’s actually sought is a more intimate relationship with the universe, a broader range of perceptions, a contact with the Great Mystery. As I’ve written before, I feel that the goal of primitivism is primarily that of a shift in and expansion of consciousness, rather than just learning different skills.

In many ways, going to town (i.e. civilization) gets in the way of all of this. When you’re trying to learn how to commune with Mother Nature, and your senses become attuned to the sounds and sights and rhythm of the woods, even hearing a jarring voice can be disruptive. The more deeply you can be immersed in the wilderness experience, the more deeply you will be attuned to the web of life.

So, in general, I agree with the goals of Teaching Drum—of course I would, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone in the first place.

But the fantasy clashes hard with the reality. The longest period I ever spent away from town was twelve days. I was constantly drawn back, primarily by my need for comfort and ease. Because living in the woods, in that situation, really was quite relentless.

And that’s dangerous.

When engaging in any sort of alteration of consciousness, one embarks on a course of action that causes destabilization of the self. Small shifts result in minor instability; large shifts result in major instability. Of course, consciousness is altered by anything and everything that happens, so stability of consciousness is itself an illusion, a fluid and dynamic thing that changes with every passing moment. But for most people, the self that they identify with remains pretty much the same from day to day, remaining balanced amidst the small shifts that always occur.

When a major destabilizing event happens, though, it leads to confusion and chaos. You can have two basic responses: Either you deal with it, or you don’t. If you don’t, you can deny it or get angry at it or run away from it or get depressed about it. If you deal with it, you learn something new about yourself and the world, and you grow, and find a higher order of stability.

In order to deal with such chaos effectively, though, you have to have the psychic space and the energy or personal power to do so.

So what happens when you’re stuck living out in the woods, with no retreat possible? When you’ve told yourself that “come hell or high water, I’m going to stick it out”?

What happens when your desire to stay out in the woods is not matched by your ability to do so?

I believe that this situation—throwing civilized people into the woods for one year with few safety valves—leads inevitably to exhaustion, leads inevitably to people not dealing with the chaos effectively. It’s practically a recipe for developing neurosis, and trauma.

Spencer writes this about the dangers of exploring the unknown:

As soon as warriors enter the [unknown] they must be aware of how they are going to get back. When a diver enters the water she knows she only has a certain amount of air, and she must know she can get back to the surface before she uses it all. Warriors can tap reserves of power they usually do not use, and when they do so they surpass previous limits and set new personal bests. Still, even these reserves are limited. Once you are running on this power reserve you are in a risky state. You must get back before you run out.

… So it is with any venture into the unknown. If you go beyond the limits of your personal power you are at great risk. The warrior must appraise the risk involved and weigh it against the risk of not getting involved. To avoid extending oneself beyond current knowledge and limitations is to run the risk of stagnation and mediocrity. To extend oneself past the range of one’s personal power is to invite the risk of exhaustion, madness, or even death.

This is a clear and concise description of one of the primary dangers of the yearlong program in its current form. It explains very well my experience of the yearlong, and why I spent many years after that essentially going in the absolute opposite direction.

I find, however, that not everyone shares my opinions. In fact, in recent years, there’s actually been an intensification in the program, a development that I feel grave misgivings about. Tamarack wrote in a forum post,

There is no more going to town in the Year-long. Town doesn’t exist, any more than it does the middle of the tundra or the Kalahari. When someone takes off, they imperil their clan. There is tremendous support and encouragement to find acceptance, strength, support, and trust in the Circle.

Anyone who tries to go to town faces Banishment. Not as a punishment, but as an opportunity to grow in self knowing and Circle consciousness. Surprisingly, people usually choose to be banished, as they consider it an opportunity to finally face the grim shadow that has been following them far too long.

What I’ve learned about myself from my experience, what seems clear as day to me now, is that expansion of consciousness must not be forced; but this is exactly what seems to be the new policy. Challenge is necessary, yes, but prolonged force is detrimental. If you push yourself too far, you invite injury or invasion by external forces.

Instead, extreme expansion must be accompanied by adequate recuperation, the consolidation of one’s boundaries. It’s the law of rhythm, of yang and yin, of day and night. You work, then rest. You go as far as you can go, then you go back to where you’re comfortable again. In Oriental medicine, too, we say that one of the habits that plagues people in our society is the inability to retreat. Balance is key.

You don’t go from 0 to 100 mph and stay there.

Any foray into the unknown should be followed by a retreat into safety. If you want to stay sane.

If such a balance is not struck, then a profound dilemma is set up in which the self is directly challenged.

 

The Self

The Psychic Split

The conditions are set: You’ve entered a situation in which you must penetrate into the unknown in a manner that is beyond your control. All of the familiar ways of obtaining the basics of life—food, water, shelter, clothing, heat—are taken away. Suddenly you live with a group of strangers. Even going to the bathroom is another world.

When all of this occurs, naturally you quickly try to find something to control, in order to feel grounded. Often, the best target for control is yourself.

In some ways, this is a useful step on the path of personal growth. According to Spencer,

[An important] aspect of knowing what to do in the unknown is shifting to internal reference points. The known is filled with familiar reference points and the space is striated, that is, lined and partitioned, in a way that one can recognize the right direction to go and the right way to act. In other words, you know your place. In the unknown, though, there are no familiar reference points. If there were, you would still be in the known. Here in the unknown, the only familiar thing is yourself. If you continue to be aware of your internal landscape and trust the intuitive decisions you make in response to it, you have the best chance of succeeding with your hunt [for personal power] …

The warrior will trust in her personal power at this point because she has nothing else to go on. In the movie Star Wars, Luke Skywalker turned off the computer of his starfighter at the most critical moment, responding to his internal teacher’s voice that told him to trust his feelings.

When you’re thrust into the unknown, and you have no other means of control over an unfamiliar situation, pressure is brought to bear on yourself to rise to the challenge. If you’re strong enough to rise to that challenge, no problem. If you aren’t, then imbalance results.

To learn to deal with the chaos of the unknown, you must develop internal alignment, rhythm, grace, relaxation, self-acceptance, compassion. More succinctly, you must learn to maintain integrity in the midst of chaos. Learning to do so is an art that comes from practice, and it’s not easily developed, in the woods or anywhere else.

This is one of the positive challenges that Teaching Drum presents.

In the Wilderness Guide Program, however, the entire process of trying to maintain integrity amidst severe challenges is fundamentally sabotaged by the nature of the program. The nature of the program is that it is essentially founded on a rift in the fabric of the psyche. The self is, by nature of the very structure of the school, split against itself, into two opposing armies.

How so?

The Wilderness Guide Program is ostensibly an attempt to directly emulate the “Old Way” as closely as possible. It succeeds in many ways, but it fails in one very important way:

The program is self-imposed.

Participants in the program engage in a collective agreement about the reality they choose to inhabit when they enter the program.

One part of them chooses to live in a fantasy. And I don’t mean that pejoratively; I just mean that it is an imagined ideal, like any other hope, dream, or expectation.

That fantasy is that you go out into the woods and you live and learn, and, because you’re in the physical environment of a Native all of the time, and learning the technological skills and a few of the cultural/relational skills associated with hunter-gatherers, and learning to interact with and depend on the Earth Mother more and more, that you start to absorb the essential character of what a Native is. To some extent that’s true.

Nevertheless, what is patently not true is the statement that “town doesn’t exist.” In fact, in the face of the existence of a town a mere ten miles away, such a statement is necessary precisely to reinforce the agreed-upon, shared illusion that living primitively is a necessity.

Because, in contrast to the fantasy, the reality is that, despite students’ immersion in an immediate physical and cultural environment that fosters Native consciousness and the Native ideal, there’s another part of them that is quite aware of where they came from and where they still exist—embedded in civilization. They are still immersed in civilization—their own personal histories, as well as the history and context within which the school itself—a federally recognized non-profit organization—exists.

Civilization remains the backdrop, the canvas on which the life of the ideal Native is being lived, the bogeyman just beyond the next hill, the mysterious dark force that all must be wary of, the dominant hierarchy against which we must rebel. It’s the reason there is an ideal of the “Native.” It’s the reason for the school’s existence; it’s the reason people choose to enter the program. Civilization is just a little bit beyond the immediate horizon, but everyone knows it’s right there. Civilization is a state of consciousness that forms the backbone of everything we know, and it’s not easily discarded.

This concept is echoed in Charles Eisenstein’s essay, “Rituals for Lover Earth,” in which he notes that many rituals in the modern age lose their power simply because the broadest context or “container” that frames the ritual is no longer based in a deeply consistent worldview that sees the universe lovingly embracing the ritual in its magical web, but rather something dead and dissociated and disbelieving of the authentic. It’s something we’re so accustomed to as to render it invisible, most of the time.

Some months ago, I attended a sweat lodge conducted by a full-blooded Native American. The ceremony was held at the top of a hill, with a station to be purified with sage smoke, another station to hear of the rules for the lodge, and so on. Each ritual was contained inside a larger ritual. But guess what the largest ritual was, the one that contained the whole experience? At the very bottom of the hill, before we could participate, we had to sign a waiver. The entire experience took place within a legal container, and that initial ritual gave primacy to the Story of the Law. I don’t think anyone experienced the sweat lodge as transformational; certainly I did not. The only real ritual was the signing of the waiver. Everything else was a “ritual.”

The same is true of the Wilderness Guide Program. The ritual that sets the context for it all is the establishment of the fundamental premise: a shared suspension of disbelief that “we must live primitively,” in the face of the actuality that life is not, at the moment, threatened by going into town.

Now, consensual, shared illusion can be a powerful tool. We do it all the time by watching movies, knowing that none of it is “real” in that it’s all acting and camera tricks, but enjoying the phenomenologically real experience of the movie nonetheless. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with setting up an artificial situation in which to learn: Martial artists do it all the time.

But the yearlong relies on the extension of consensual illusion far beyond the normal range, with correspondingly powerful, and potentially dangerous, impacts. Not to say that people in the program aren’t aware that what they’re doing is an exercise, but just that I don’t think most students (myself included) stop to think about how artificial the framework of the yearlong is—a framework that is far more pervasive than a movie or a two-hour martial arts class—and how that subconsciously influences their experience.

The falsity of this shared illusion, this suspension of disbelief, becomes most acute and distinct particularly in times of stress and difficulty.

The skills and culture of indigenous peoples were geared toward and evolved from dealing with real-life survival situations. That’s a powerful thing. In a true life-or-death situation, all resources you have are made fully available to you, to deal with the problem with whatever means necessary. If you’re starving to death, you do what it takes to sate the hunger, whether it’s eating rotting roadkill or scarfing down a McDonald’s hamburger. In circumstances imposed by Nature or by fate, you marshal all of your inner resources, without internal conflict, to engage the challenge.

There’s a freedom and a spontaneity to acting in an authentic situation. In a sense, anything goes, as long as it ensures the survival of you and your people, provides benefits, and achieves goals.

But when dealing with stress in an artificial situation, a dilemma arises. There are certain things that you have agreed that you cannot do, even though such a solution may be easier. So the available courses of action are limited, not by resources and circumstances, but by the abstractions of ideals and ideology.

When pushed to the extreme, when you know on some level (conscious or unconscious) that you are the one who imposed that difficulty, and that at any time you can end it and choose an easier path (that is against the ideal or ideology), then you start to ask yourself: Why not just end it?

It means that, in contrast to the freedom and spontaneity of the individual in the genuine situation, here you are always limiting yourself.

It becomes a matter of how much you are willing to invest in the illusion in order to achieve more abstract goals.

The myth and the romance of the yearlong’s mission justifies the life-or-death intensity that’s conveyed by the acceptance letter excerpt I quoted above. But when this intensity is combined with the subconscious knowledge that it’s actually not real, that leads directly to profound internal conflict.

Essentially, when a difficult situation arises out at camp, a part of you wants to leave (and knows it can leave), and part of you wants to stay (because it’s life-or-death, no escape). This is a split in the psyche, and each side draws on your inner resources, thus effectively pitting one aspect of the self against another, as one tries to uphold the illusion and the other wants the easier way out.

Another way of putting it is that, while on the one hand you are forced by circumstance to rely on internal reference points, on the other hand, those same internal reference points are telling you that your suffering is effectively based on illusion, yet you have to choose to remain in it anyway. It’s a very strange bind.

 

Being With the Negativity

Now, the usual answer at Teaching Drum—one that has some validity (nothing done there lacks validity)—is not to run away, not to take the easy way out, but to face your fears and your pain, so that you come to know yourself better. That’s certainly something I resonate with.

Imagine … [that] you are not returning to the familiar outside environs from which you have ventured … You, along with these virtual strangers, will be living and learning with each other for the next forty-seven weeks. Does this seem a long time? Too short? How do you think you may feel spending three-hundred and forty consecutive days in such a place with a bare minimum of distractions or escapes? Eating a very simple diet, day in and day out?

Will you Be with whatever frames of mind and emotional states that may visit you—can you imagine yourself enduring being overwhelmed or inundated by fear, negativity? In the case that you do feel overwhelmed, can you in turn sit (and learn) with and from those feelings? Expect to spend large amounts of quality time with your own raw material—emotional, psychological, physical, spiritual. No one will be telling you The Way (Out, nor In)—such a way will be up to you to discover if you desire it.

One of the gifts of the program is that spending time with your inner pain gives you the priceless gifts of self-awareness and patience that can then be applied to every situation and relationship in your life. Crossing into healing yourself in your own time and way generates self-empowerment …

— Excerpt from Letter to Prospective Seekers
by graduates of the 2005-2006 Wilderness Guide Program

To be present with, rather than escape, negative feelings and states of mind is important in life, and I firmly believe in it. It’s also the root of many spiritual practices, for instance Buddhist mindfulness meditation, or vipassana.

Meditation is not easy. It takes time and it takes energy. It also takes grit, determination, and discipline. It requires a host of personal qualities that we normally regard as unpleasant and like to avoid whenever possible. We can sum up all of these qualities with the American word gumption. Meditation takes gumption. It is certainly a great deal easier just to sit back and watch television. So why bother? Why waste all that time and energy when you could be out enjoying yourself? Why? Simple. Because you are human. Just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life that simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your awareness for a time; you can distract yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back, and usually when you least expect it.

— Bhante Henepola Gunaratana,
Mindfulness in Plain English

There are indeed many benefits to this approach. Mindfulness is at the core of many spiritual traditions for good reason: It grounds you in the present, which is where true power resides. The importance of that cannot be underestimated.

However, as applied in difficult circumstances to solve problems, mindfulness alone has significant limitations.

First, the practice of simply facing yourself is not a panacea. Mindfulness of your internal conflicts does not necessarily lead to accompanying resolution. And that’s fine as long as you don’t hold that expectation. As every author I’ve quoted here will tell you (including Tamarack), expectation quickly disrupts mindfulness and warrior consciousness. Mindfulness works only so long as you don’t expect it to solve your problems, but more to enrich your experience of yourself.

Second, unfortunately, despite the rhetoric, sometimes mindfulness is applied as a problem-solving measure.

Jonesing for a cigarette? Don’t run away to town, just sit with it!

Want chocolate? Resist the urge to escape, this is an opportunity to Be with your cravings!

Being mindful can bring wisdom; but, interestingly enough, it can also reinforce policy, specifically the policy of not going to town. And that’s a dangerous admixture. It intertwines the dictates of the program too closely with the intimacy of knowing oneself, creating an inner voice whose motives are unclear. Am I Being with my pain in order to know myself, or to please others?

I had this experience many times at Nishnajida, where there was a lot of soul-searching and Circle talking and discussion of feelings about a task that had to be done—and in the end, the external circumstances did not change. Lodges still had to be built, firewood still had to be gathered, hides still had to be tanned—even though the necessity is essentially an illusion. It was, in effect, like arguing with a brick wall: The best you can do is reconcile yourself to the fact that it’s there, and learn to respond with its inevitability with grace and dignity.

You can see an example yourself, in the Part 1 video of the 2008-2009 yearlong. At about 7:36 into the clip, Tamarack says to everyone,

I’d like to suggest that we work from dawn until dusk till this lodge is done, and that we be as a circle to do it.

Okay, how are we going to do it?

Observe the stark contrast between the concreteness of the stated physical need and the clear lack of enthusiasm, energy, and motivation on everybody’s part. And how is this resolved? Not easily.

In my opinion, while learning to deal with unwanted challenges gracefully is part and parcel of living life, as a pervasive aspect of an immersion program aimed at learning and growth, it leaves much to be desired.

Further, applied in this way as a problem-solving measure, the practice of mindfulness only works halfway. There must be ways to address the structure of one’s experience so that the suffering that inevitably crops up is addressed and some attempt is made to alleviate it. Although sometimes it can be profoundly healing just to sit with yourself, sometimes it’s not enough to simply be aware of your own suffering; the next step is to take action to relieve your suffering, preferably at its roots.

But at Teaching Drum, the primary methods of emotional healing, as I will discuss, are based in community relationship, not personal transformation. While powerful, that approach has a number of drawbacks, the most relevant one at this point being that systematic introspection and self-inquiry—which I consider to be fundamental to the self-healing process—become virtually overlooked. This is an oversight that hits right where it hurts. Just when internal reference points need to be developed, they are ignored in favor of interpersonal reference points.

Once again, the boundaries become dangerously entangled; and moreover, the fundamental psychic split remains unaddressed.

This is, at base, an essential human question of how to deal with suffering. The dilemma folks at Teaching Drum face is perhaps best encapsulated by Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl:

… Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.

But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering—provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological, or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.

— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

This begs the question: Is the yearlong a necessary suffering, in which tremendous heights of meaning can be discovered in the face of authentic need? Or is it an unnecessary suffering, coming merely from misguided self-imposed punishment, thereby becoming an exercise in masochism? I see great potential for both; it’s not black and white, not an either-or thing. But this vagueness makes it all the more imperative to be clear in your intention while you are in this situation.

To sum up: A basic, dualistic psychological stance that characterizes the yearlong is the need to be in the woods and the awareness that that need is illusion.

As expected, this schizophrenic stance leads to an obsession with civilization, with going to town, with sugary foods, with tobacco, etc.

When people are overwhelmed by the unknown, and divided against themselves, and are given no guidance on setting up the proper psychological structures or healing practices to integrate that division, yet they want to stay out in the woods, what can be done?

The answer that Teaching Drum gives is: A reliance on the tribe.

 

The Community

At Teaching Drum there are three prominent practices of community relationship—and social control—that I’d like to discuss:

1. Truthspeaking and the Circle Talk
2. Personal Responsibility
3. Banishment

 

1. Truthspeaking and the Circle Talk

Truthspeaking is front and center in the Teaching Drum canon, and rightfully so. It is probably the single most important practice I learned there, and is both profound and simple. As Tamarack puts it:

How to Truthspeak:

• Get in touch with your truth.
• Express your truth clearly and concisely.
• Do it spontaneously.

How to Truthlisten:

• Be open and accepting.
• Give acknowledgment.
• Give encouragement.

All of this is based on the premise that people in civilization do not really hear and do not really have the space to speak. And so a cultural environment for openness and frank talk is encouraged at Teaching Drum, and for me has literally been life-changing. It has helped me in all of my relationships.

The talking circle is a method that formalizes truthspeaking. Everyone sits in a circle. Only one person speaks at a time, holding a symbolic object (it can anything, even a twig off the ground). When that person is done, the object is passed to the next person. Everyone gets a chance to speak, and the circle continues until everyone agrees that discussion is over. (I’ve seen talking circles that last all day.)

These practices are very beneficial, and I’m reluctant to dig into their shadows. I think the world would be a better place if they were adopted more widely.

Unfortunately, every practice has its dark side, and this is no exception.

From my own personal experience, truthspeaking can be very powerful, but also very damaging for those who do not share the same intent—that intent being that one must commit to honesty, and expect that others will too. Truthspeak hard feelings to those who don’t share your mindset, and they will likely respond as if they were being attacked.

Of course, this is less of a problem at Teaching Drum, where a culture of honesty is established right from the beginning.

Instead, it begs a different question, one that explores the opposite extreme: What are the consequences of a culture that expects total honesty?

In short, the answer is: an erosion of healthy personal boundaries.

One of the more extreme consequences I’ve seen is that everyone is expected to “spill the beans.” If there’s an interpersonal conflict, truthspeaking and talking circles are leaned on heavily to help clear the air. This is a good thing, if the intrapersonal reasons behind those conflicts are readily accessible. That is to say, if I’m mad at you, and we talk about it, and I can easily access why I got mad at you, then things are quickly resolved.

Problems arise, though, when intrapersonal issues are not so readily accessible, either due to a lack of awareness, or to an unwillingness to share that awareness. Because the expectation is so heavy, and interpersonal methods of resolution are so emphasized, this actually builds pressure on a person to disclose.

Here’s where we get into problems.

• Truthspeaking is valid only insofar as the person who speaks it knows their own truth.
• Knowing your own truth means developing awareness and integrity of being.
• Integrity of being means developing solid boundaries, a stable ego, the wisdom to know what to disclose and what to preserve in privacy, and utter trust in oneself.

See the problem? When healthy ego boundaries are established, you develop a sense of wholeness that includes a healthy space of privacy. This becomes problematic when you live in a culture where people are expected to disclose. So what happens when issues aren’t shared? In that case, the implicit rules are being broken, and a concerted effort is made to focus on the “real issue,” which is, supposedly, what’s going on with the individual, and why isn’t he telling us what’s up? This can result in tension and strained relationships.

This pressure to disclose can be a subtle form of violence.

It can even add insult to injury when, as happens so often, you are encouraged to disclose for your own good, e.g. to facilitate your own healing. Sometimes, of course, this is helpful. But sometimes, the true healing takes place intrapersonally, within each individual’s own unique being, and away from the prying eyes of others.

Perhaps an even more significant problem is the assumption that personal disclosure leads to resolution.

Because truthspeaking is so heavily leaned on, this gives rise to the assumption that all interpersonal conflicts and organizational problems that arise must be resolved at the level of the personal issue. And this works fine if that’s appropriate, if those personal issues are relevant to the matter at hand.

But it can become particularly inappropriate, and even abusive, when personal issues are not at all the root of the problem. Sometimes personal issues point at real difficulties whose roots are beyond the personal. And sometimes, personal issues are just plain irrelevant. To point the finger back on somebody’s “personal problems” can actually be a way to avoid the real problem. Taking this approach avoids discussing the problem on its own terms, instead placing the focus on what’s wrong with the messenger, rather than on the content of the actual message.

This can devolve into what are known as ad hominem arguments.

All of these are threatening to personal sovereignty and a healthy ego. Unfortunately, when all other reference points have vanished, you tend to be wide open and willing to yield to these sorts of interactions, just to have some sort of structure. Still, the potential end result is a less well-differentiated sense of personal boundary, an unhealthy fusion of self with community.

From a broader standpoint, the main problem with the use of truthspeaking is that it is a method, a tool, not a complete system. As a tool, it’s excellent when used to counteract the common practices of evading, lying, and being superficial or inauthentic. But its use and consequences are influenced, and limited, by the culture it’s used in.

And when the culture it’s used in is already engaged in the act of splitting the psyche against itself—a fundamental deception—then it becomes obvious that truthspeaking itself can be used as a smokescreen to avoid very basic questions about the reality you’re experiencing.

A few basic questions can help to clarify this reality.

“What is taboo?”

“What is not okay to say?”

“What feelings do I not feel safe to express?”

The answers to these questions can give hints regarding the dark side or shadow of the culture or reality you inhabit.

 

2. Personal Responsibility

To their credit, people at Teaching Drum are somewhat aware of the potential for community relationship to erode healthy personal boundaries, which is why an emphasis is placed on personal responsibility.

Or, in Drumspeak: “Don’t be a victim.”

Victimhood is the psychological posture that you have been wronged. It’s one manifestation of the general principle that you create your own reality. As with truthspeaking, it has been an empowering experience for me to recognize that I am the one responsible for my own hurt feelings. That skill is useful in separating myself from the habitual reactive patterns that keep me locked in negative emotional and relational cycles.

And as with truthspeaking, I feel reluctant to criticize, since I see it as having value. But this is another practice that I see misapplied.

The central problem is not in the principle of recognizing one’s own victimhood. Rather, the problem is the application of this principle to people other than yourself. The culture of honesty at Teaching Drum fosters an environment where you can easily “call people” on their “shit,” confront them with hard truths they need to hear, force them to take an honest look at their own flaws.

“Tough love” can be very helpful and therapeutic. It can challenge people in difficult but ultimately healing ways. It can shake people out of their usual, reactive frames of reference, and encourage them to respond more consciously, in healthier ways.

It can also just make you scared of being called a victim.

And if you’re scared of being called a victim, then maybe you’ll do any number of emotional gymnastics to avoid it. In truth, applied simplistically, this practice creates as many problems as it solves.

The response to anger is a good example. In this culture the expression of anger tends to be discouraged. Anger is one of the most powerful ways of expressing that, in essence, you feel injured by someone else. Because of its force, it can be threatening where an admission of weakness is not. So, I’ve had interactions with people who have been fine with me crying my eyes out over a hurt, but when I’ve expressed anger, they got very hostile and accused me of being a victim. The accusation of victimhood becomes a trump card to hold over anyone who threatens to allow their assignation of responsibility to anyone but themselves. It is used to control another’s expression.

To avoid this, people develop the habit either of not expressing that anger, or expressing their anger and quickly “owning” it, i.e. “I-feel-really-angry-because I’m afraid.” It becomes acceptable to express woundedness and vulnerability, but not rage, at least not without qualification.

But why? Just because one is threatening and one is not, why should one be a more valid expression of one’s pain than another? After all, someone who screams his head off is in obvious pain—perhaps more authentically so than one who quietly and stoically describes his hurt feelings and weakness.

A culture that labels some feelings as okay to express and others as not okay is creating a situation of conditional acceptance. You are accepted as long as you’re not angry. If you are angry, you’re accepted as long as you blame it on yourself. But this can be counterproductive to a healing community, and counterproductive to the healing process. To value one’s feelings fully, they must first by understood in their entire context, within a totally open and accepting healing space, without censorship or editing, without judging or shutting down any aspect of that context before it’s fully understood. Then can they be deconstructed.

But this process is often short-circuited by the quick jump to avoid being a victim.

Again, while it’s a very powerful thing to recognize that one is in control of one’s victimhood, as a social practice, it can very easily be co-opted as a subtle system of social control, especially if other checks and balances are not simultaneously instituted. The potential for corruption is great.

The crux of the problem is that the application of “calling you on your shit” only works when the one doing the calling behaves with integrity. Which means, in turn, that one of the primary methods used for personal development in the yearlong relies on the integrity of someone else. And that confusion of boundaries is, by nature, an erosion in integrity.

And in its extreme form, it denies the reality that sometimes other people are responsible. It denies the reality that people can and do affect each other. It seals people into solipsistic bubbles, where everything that happens to us—good or bad—is of our own making.

But this is inconsistent with reality, and moreover, devalues reality. When a friend makes me laugh, I am right to assign to him a certain measure of responsibility for my pleasure. When someone performs an injustice, it would be burying my head in the sand to deny that person at least some responsibility for my anger.

We are not alone. We don’t have to pretend to be. There are healthy ways to stand on our own feet while interacting with others. Calling other people victims is one of the more questionable ways, unless applied with elegance and expertise.

 

3. Banishment

While I can endorse the other social practices, recognizing that only in some ways do they behave pathologically, I don’t see the value of banishment as it is applied in the Wilderness Guide Program.

Here is an excerpt from an article Tamarack wrote on the topic.

The tradition of exile in western societies goes back to their earliest roots, and the practice itself probably goes back to the first social animals. Many group-living animals, including all primates, will drive out and sometimes kill members who exhibit anti-social behaviors. Because the practice is nearly universal with Humans who live the clan way, it was likely practiced by our pre-agricultural ancestors since time immemorial.

How does Banishment in the Old-Way differ from exile in the western tradition? On the surface there may appear to be no difference, as the net effect is the same; however, the spirit of each differs markedly. Imagine how you would feel ordering a political enemy to leave the country, as opposed to asking your sister to leave your family.

With the clan’s intimate, trusting family environment, there is little opportunity or motivation for acting in ways that would be harmful to one’s clan-mates, and peer pressure plays a strong role in discouraging infringements. If not, there is no higher order to issue judgment or assign punishment, and there are no penal institutions for controlling the offender. Instead, when the imbalance is serious or chronic, and when all other options have been exhausted, Banishment may be considered.

The offender commonly leaves willingly, usually offering to go before she needs to be asked, because she too wants the clan to remain strong and not be victimized by her actions. By leaving she is caring for herself right along with her clan. Because native life-way is comprised of circular relationships, it is near impossible to honor and respect others and not self, and vice versa. At the same time her clan cares for her, because love is the reason for the Banishment. They want to see her healthy, strong and happy, so they support her entirely on her healing journey.

Banishment is, in short, a method of social control, based on peer pressure. And a painful one, at that—despite the happy rhetoric.

A (non-Teaching-Drum) friend of mine wrote to me,

Banishing negates ties and existence. Empathetically, if my banishment were publicly called for and defended, I would feel so abandoned and hated. I would feel very unloved and unlovable. Ignoring me starves me of relationship and would bring about my death, probably not literal, but “death.” It’s so fascinating to me that human babies can be given all the physical nourishment they need (food, shelter stuff) but if they are not related to with affection and warmth and value they die. Doesn’t that speak to something about what it means to be human and the holistic nature of our psychology and body? Socrates invited death over banishment, and as I reread his Apology recently, it’s easy to see his humanity and his suffering in the community’s actions against him.

Nonetheless, as has been pointed out to me, there are recorded instances of therapeutic banishment:

Frank Brown (Heiltsuk) was a Native youth headed for a juvenile detention center for brutally assaulting a man when trying to steal liquor. His uncle and aunt intervened and asked the judge to sentence him to the traditional Native punishment of banishment. He spent eight months alone on an island and credits the experience with changing his life. This was recorded in Phil Lucas’ film, Voyage of Rediscovery.

Even in these cases, though, it’s interesting to note that banishment was a response to an extreme situations. It’s employed as a last resort; this is something Tamarack’s quote above states as well.

According to an article titled “Exiling One’s Kin: Banishment and Disenrollment in Indian Country,” (PDF) (from Turtle Talk), among the Cherokee,

Behaviors that were considered deviations included theft of sacred objects, women’s taboos, assaults, hunting violations, witchcraft, arson, marriage within one’s clan, sex crimes, and murder. Sanctions ranged from name calling, public disgrace, whipping, and sickness for lesser offenses, to stoning, mutilation, and—the ultimate penalty—death for more serious offenses … Interestingly, while death could be imposed for numerous deviations … expulsion was mentioned only once.

In a more general summary of the banishment practices of various American Indian tribes, the article notes:

It is clear, then, that although tribal nations historically had the power to exclude, banish, or exile individuals, it was a power they rarely used, due to the spiritually cohesive nature of tribal collectives and the assortment of informal sanctions that were in place that generally worked to ensure peace and social order in the society. Ostracism, public ridicule, or the destruction of a culprit’s lodge, weapons, or other implements, was generally sufficient to resocialize the offending individual or family and restore harmony to the community.

Now, the question is, how is this practice applicable to students at Teaching Drum?

Let’s take a look back to what Tamarack said:

Anyone who tries to go to town faces Banishment. Not as a punishment, but as an opportunity to grow in self knowing and Circle consciousness. Surprisingly, people usually choose to be banished, as they consider it an opportunity to finally face the grim shadow that has been following them far too long.

Let’s unpack this paragraph a little bit, as it feels confusing to me.

First of all, the statement that it’s not a punishment is untrue. Banishment may not be named as punishment, but a pain-causing response to an undesired behavior is the very definition of punishment.

We know that banishment works because it is painful. We know that it is instituted as a response to an undesired behavior. Therefore it is, de facto, a punishment. The rhetoric, however, names it “an opportunity to grow in self-knowing and Circle consciousness.” Yet from our discussion above, we are all too aware that methods of self-awareness can very easily be co-opted to serve the purposes of social control.

Further, it is not surprising that people who want to remain part of the community would choose to be banished if that is what it takes to play by the rules that preserve the integrity of that community.

Still, all of this may be irrelevant if the banishment is appropriate. But what, then, is the objective of the banishment?

“Anyone who tries to go to town faces Banishment.”

That is to say, going to town, an adaptive response that we saw earlier as an attempt (misguided or not) to retreat and touch base with familiar and safe reference points, is, not merely discouraged, but criminalized and pathologized.

Both the reason for the punishment and the scale of the punishment are totally at odds with the traditional Native use of this practice.

There’s something wrong with a cultural system that imposes even a temporary banishment on an ordinary act like going to town. How could it be considered even in the same category as drug-dealing, assault, or murder?

Perhaps because, increasingly, Teaching Drum prioritizes the community over the individual, and confuses the length of wilderness experience with the quality of that experience, and thus makes the entire community responsible for the duration of an individual’s experience. In such a situation, where community integrity has such a high priority and is also relatively fragile—vulnerable to each individual’s “weaknesses”—then it is easy to see how any act that threatens to disrupt that integrity could be criminalized. According to Tamarack, referring to banishment,

Looking at the year-long experience as a whole, I see the increased emphasis on maintaining its integrity as a wilderness immersion experience as a resounding success.

But in my view, to sacrifice the integrity of individuals in order to reinforce the integrity of the community is to discover that the community has no real integrity at all.

I believe that a practice that punishes someone for seeking to meet their human need of comfort and safety amplifies the potential for danger and imbalance among the students of the yearlong.

Moreover, I believe that the philosophy behind the need for a banishment practice is fundamentally flawed. The apparent method of achieving integrity is to push people as far as possible by forcing them to stay in the wilderness as long as possible. I posit that this is less than useful, especially considering the fallout.

It would be far better to remove the focus from duration, and place it on quality. If you can achieve quality by staying out several weeks, fine. But if after one or two or seven weeks, the quality degrades, then honor that, and allow a retreat. Even better would be to forget about how long you stay out, and focus on how well you are when you’re in the woods.

This is a truism that I learned in qigong, which makes much sense: Five minutes of high-quality practice is worth more than half an hour of low-quality practice. You’ll get more out of it, progress faster, and most importantly, enjoy it.

What can be better for building depth of experience in the woods than enjoyment?

Make quality of experience the goal. Don’t turn it into a mere endurance test.

Don’t force an imaginary community integrity as if that alone will carry people into a state of Oneness. Respect every individual’s process as his or her own unique form of integrity.

 

Synthesis

Let’s tie this all together.

(1) The practice of forcing oneself to stay in the unknown beyond one’s ability to handle it, when an “out” is readily available, leads to (2) the fundamental psychic split, in which one self maintains an illusion while the other tries to degrade it.

A psychic split means that one self is the aggressor and the other—get this—is the victim. Therefore, by forcing yourself to stay out at camp, you unavoidably become a victim—although this is ultimately, of course, of your own making, since you chose to participate in the program. However, it makes the psychic reality no less true.

I believe that Teaching Drum subconsciously acknowledges this, which is one of the reasons why (3) an emphasis is placed on personal responsibility and avoiding victimhood to remain present (i.e. in the woods), efforts reinforced by self-disclosure and, as a last resort, banishment, in order to avoid facing the root cause of the problem. These methods secondarily attempt to resolve the psychic split through community relationship, because the primary cause of that split is the framework of the program itself!

I remember clearly one day when I was out at camp, utterly depressed and sitting around because I felt so heavily the weight of my life in the woods. And one of my campmates called me on it and said that I was being a victim, that I reminded him of a moping little kid who was blaming someone else for his suffering. And I felt, simultaneously, the utter truth of his statement, and the utter helplessness of my situation nonetheless.

Thus, the irony is that the program itself reinforces what it wishes to eliminate.

The other manifestation of this irony is that the very relationship of yearlong students to town is that of victimhood. You accept that town can and does influence you strongly, and so you fight it and avoid it; but this relationship rests on the premise that there is a sharp division, the identification of self/”primitive” as diametrically opposed to other/”civilized.”

But what you fight, you make stronger.

 

Conclusion

In summary, we’ve taken a look at the ways in which the Teaching Drum community blocks a healthy retreat from the unknown; injects confusion into one’s ability to develop internal reference points in oneself; fosters an untenable psychic split; and misapplies relational methods as techniques of social control.

All of this is to say that there is room for improvement.

Regarding my personal motivations, I will reveal that, deep down, I am in love with the ideals of Teaching Drum, with its mythology and philosophy. I wish to God that it had worked out a lot better for me. I’m pleased to see how enriched some people’s lives are by it, and disheartened to see people “spit out from the Mother’s bosom.” So it makes me upset to see the program moving in directions that I feel are not useful, applying practices that seem designed to create, not eliminate, disharmony.

The accusations may be made that I haven’t been back to Teaching Drum in awhile; and that my experience may be atypical. The latter is true of any personal analysis; take it for what it is. As for the former, I will just say that I don’t believe culture changes that quickly, and I think if you read other accounts or talk to other alumni or dropouts, that many of them will experience what my analysis predicts.

To me, the idea that “town doesn’t exist” is a denial of the extremely powerful reality of civilization in people’s minds and hearts. That which is ignored cannot be addressed and transformed, and since it remains a part of you, it always returns. Which is why, ironically, I have rarely heard of a person who emerged from the yearlong without powerful addictions, especially to food.

Civilization exists, and cannot be denied, just as the rational self now exists, and cannot be denied. The question is, how do we move through this? How do we integrate what has been dissociated, what is causing us as individuals and as a global society so much pain, without committing the pre/trans fallacy, without losing the positive aspects and meaning of our experience in ego and civilization?

This is the question, and one I hope that programs like Teaching Drum can do a better job of answering. Because they are doing important work, and it is my hope that they continue to do so.

On a personal level, for a long time, even though I made it through an entire year, I considered myself a failure. I guess I might be considered to have half-assed my way through my year in the woods. I kept my car parked by the side of the road, and every so often went to sit in it, just to sit in a seat with back support and get out of the mosquitoes. I kept a stash of books in it too. I used it to drive myself into town, to binge on food. I always felt guilty doing so, “knowing” that I was short-circuiting my own development.

But now, I have no regrets. I did what I needed to do to preserve my sanity. I did what I had to do to survive.

Now, even having regained most of my health, I know that I couldn’t do the new, intensified program. I don’t think I would even want to; the safety valves have gone from few to virtually none. When learning becomes suffering, there is something not right.

The yearlong is essentially a one-size-fits-all method. It works for some people, certainly. A few people thrive. Many others leave. Many who stay suffer. In the end, I suppose that everyone learns the lessons they need to learn. But I think that some of those lessons are not those that Teaching Drum intends to teach.

Perhaps one of the greatest problems I see at Teaching Drum is that the goals of the program are, I feel, profoundly unclear; or, at least, the goals and the methods are profoundly at odds. Learning skills like fire-making and hide-tanning are concrete enough, for sure. But if the ultimate goal is to induce a permanent change in consciousness, to facilitate the experience of attunement with nature, then there is much need for refinement.

In the final analysis, though, it’s already acknowledged that my path and the path of the Teaching Drum Outdoor School follow diverging trajectories. So I can only hope that this essay serves as a cautionary note to anyone who embarks upon, or is considering, an experience like the Wilderness Guide Program.