Imagine
By Dr. Mike Anderson
Imagine: You are alone in the jungle. Suddenly you are surprised by a coiled pit viper. There are two more behind you. What do you do?
To help Ooznahvi answer this question, I decided to take her with me for an afternoon stroll. We set out down Arco Iris, a scenic, looping road in the hills outside of Boquete where I rent a luxurious house that literally looks like a castle. It was a beautiful December day late in coffee season, but we could still see the Indians in traditional dress hauling bags of freshly picked coffee berries. The brugmansia, the white trumpet-shaped flowers that hang their heads along the side of the road, were still in bloom. We continued our walk, turning onto Bajo Mono, another country road that traces the tumbling headwaters of the Caldera River, passing cascading waterfalls and charming bridges until it finally reaches the trailhead for the famous Quetzal Trail. We were on our way to confront fear at the Skeleton Temple.
Some of our fears are primordial -- they are part of our hard wiring, our collective unconscious. In many ways they unite us and help us survive. But some of our fears we learn as individuals, and they become obstacles to the achievement of our personal goals. The single most important step to overcoming these fears is to simply identify them and discover where we learned them. The dark halls and vacant rooms of the Skeleton Temple are like the caverns of our unconscious. They wait for us to shine a light and see that there is nothing to be afraid of. The temple was the perfect place for Ooznahvi’s first shamanic journey to the underworld.
The Skeleton Temple, as I call it, is an ominous, unfinished mansion guarded by barb wire and imposing eucalyptus trees. It looks like an ashen palace, noble, yet completely unloved. The local legend says that a wealthy Arab built it for his fiancé, who later killed herself after he was gone on work for an unusually long while. They say she plunged herself in the rapids of the river that runs along the edge of the property. After learning of her death, the wealthy owner didn’t have the heart either to finish the construction or to sell it.
I threw my jacket onto the barbed wire to help Ooznahvi over. She protested – this was illegal, she said, there could be dangerous homeless people inside. This, of course, was all possible, but this was merely her fear of the unknown searching for a rationale in logic. As we approached the house, she convinced herself that no one else was nearby and began laughing nervously. I helped her through a ground floor window and we waited inside for the sun to set behind the volcano.
When it was dark, Ooznahvi laid flat on the floor, and I put my jacket over her to keep away the chill. I arranged several candles around her. When I lit them, they cast dancing, fleeting shadows against the wall. I lit a stick of sandalwood incense and began tapping on a shamanic drum given to me by a Haida Indian Chief in British Columbia.
To call this initiation ritual a form of guided psychoanalysis would not be incorrect. But this definition implies nothing more than projected imagination on behalf of the initiate, when often there is quite a profound discovery – a bridging of the conscious and unconscious that can be quite traumatic.
We synchronized our breathing and I brought Ooznahvi to a deep level of meditative relaxation. There we journeyed through a forest to a cave, the metaphorical entrance to the underworld – the unconscious. I suggested steps inside the cave and she saw a massive spiral staircase – atypical for a girl her age.
Inside the Skeleton Temple, water dripped down from a hole in the roof, forming a puddle in the adjacent room. Guided by the steady metronome of the dripping water, we slowly made our way down the staircase, each step groaning beneath our weight. I told her to stop when she found a door. After fifteen steps down, she paused before her bedroom door in the apartment she shared with her mother and younger brother. When she opened the door, the candles in the Skeleton Temple flickered and the shadows on the wall jumped.
Now to all of my readers with a healthy sense of scientific skepticism: I didn’t lead her on or suggest that each step represented a year of her life. Ooznahvi is twenty three years old, and she climbed down fifteen steps. In our journey we traveled to a time when she was eight years old, exactly fifteen years ago. We know this because we went to the apartment where she lived when she was eight, and there on the bed in her room was a third grade mathematics textbook. This is the power of the unconscious.
In addition to the school books on the bed, there were scattered pieces of a puzzle. At first they confused her. But then she realized this was Christmas Day, and the puzzle was a gift she had bought for her younger brother. She wandered out of her room. In the Skeleton Temple we lost our synchronized breathing. Something was urgent. She was looking for something.
While each step represents a year in a life, the door represents that year when a fear was learned. It is an opportunity to go back and identify the cause and change one thing, anything, so that you can confront the event without fear.
She found her mother sitting on a chair, smiling. She had a small wrapped package, evidently a CD. Ooznahvi was excited. She was expecting this. She asked for it. She told her mom that she wanted the Backstreet Boys latest album and she knew her mother had told her father in the States to get it for her. She reached out to take the present and tear off the wrapping paper. Her mother clapped her hands together in anticipation.
In The Skeleton Temple, Ooznahvi held her breath. A tear rolled down the corner of her eye. She knew what came next. Not The Backstreet Boys, but a decades old David Hasselhof CD obviously straight from the bargain bin at Wal-Mart.
“This is your moment to change,” I told Ooznahvi. “Anything.” She could have changed the CD or stopped herself from crying. But the change she chose was entirely different than what I expected. She chose to cry in front of her mother instead of burying her tears in the pillows of her room. It was not the fear of abandonment that afflicted her. It was the fear of not being able to be brave enough for herself and her mother – the fear of not having the courage to be alone.
She cried, both in the temple and in her Panama City apartment. When she calmed, we synchronized our breathing once more, and together we climbed the creaking wooden stairs to the waking world. When she was back in the Skeleton Temple, she was surprised that the candles had not completely burned down. We had been down in the cave for not more than ten minutes.
Ooznahvi then told me that she understood.
Imagine: You are alone in the jungle. Suddenly you are surprised by a coiled pit viper. There are two more behind you. What do you do?
You stop… and change what you are imagining. After all, the snakes are only in your imagination.
What’s the Vet Number?
By Steve Banks
Hey Dude,
How is Andrew? Still on the geriatric revival tour with the Backstreet Boys?
Everything is fine here… really enjoying it actually.
Gabriel is keeping busy carrying rocks down the hill.
Garden died though. Guess you need to water it.
Not really saving up much money to build the zip line, either. Seems to be less male backpackers these days for some unknown reason. Luz is not happy about it. Well that’s not true -- she is happy one second, pissed off the next. She is going to group therapy alone.
Guess I missed your call. Best not to call before ten… I like to sleep in. Heard you do too. And you take lots of naps. I don’t believe what they say though. That you sneak away with the BlackBerry to download Bestiality porn before nap time, then cry yourself to sleep over the latest sad news of Lindsay Lohan.
Email me back so I can taunt you again.
One of your few friends,
Steve
P.S. Rocky is fine. Do you have the number to his vet?
Foosball More Fun
By Steve Banks
Hey Andy,
Matt and Maria are like two nuts in a banana hammock.
To get a more optimum ration of guys to girls, girls now drink for free all night in the bar if they play foosball topless.
It’s nicer talking to you than Patrick… his thought train has no caboose.
Nico does all the check-ins now. He’s a little slow… takes an hour and half to watch Sixty Minutes.
I bought a wife beater. Goes well with my Panama Hat. Girls are digging me and Estrella keeps trying to get pregnant. How do you keep your sponsored child from wanting to spawn?
Your Bud,
Steve
P.S. Still warm.
Response:
Steve,
I told her if I want to hear the sound of little feet going pitter patter, I would put shoes on Rocky.
Andrew
P.S. No. Would you fuck her if you knew she had crabs?
I Am the Jaguar
By María Concepción
I am alone when I find the green rock on Río del Oro.
I take my clothes off and stretch out.
The curve is perfect for the back, sun perfect for my skin.
I play.
I sleep.
I awake. It is black. So black I wonder if I am just in my mind. But it is too cold to be a lucid dream.
I stumble on the rocks but find my shoes… put my clothes in my day pack.
I need my hands to feel ahead of me. Crawl on all fours.
Misery. Then ecstasy.
I hear the whispers of trees.
The spirits of the jungle.
I find a cave and pass out exhausted.
I awake to the sight of the jaguar’s breath.
I find my power animal.
I am the jaguar.