This newsletter explores Individuation — a ritual to connect with a group of mentors and friends:

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who reached out with words of encouragement after last week’s somewhat “wobbly” post — I’m really grateful for your support.

It was illuminating for me to experience the way in which a little vulnerability can open up doorways of instant connection with others — perhaps something for us all to keep in mind as we navigate these topsy-turvy times.

As one friend who wrote to me put it:

While processing your feedback (which is summarized at the bottom of this post if you’re interested to see), I’ve been reflecting a lot on the notion of gifts — the gifts that I received from each of you through your various messages, and the gifts that I do my best to offer each week through these written reflections.

I’ve been wondering: What makes something a gift? What is the difference between a gift and a privilege? What does it mean to be gifted? How can we help one another discover and develop our gifts? What would it mean to live in a gifted society?

To understand the essence of gift, it may be helpful to explore the shamanic notion of “medicine.” In various shamanic traditions, the word medicine is used to describe the unique combination of qualities that a particular living thing embodies. For instance, the medicine of a tree is the way it offers shade and shelter; the way it models the beauty that can arise from being rooted in a single place over time; the way it teaches flexibility: changing with the seasons, and bending without breaking in the breeze. Together, this combination of qualities constitutes what is known as tree medicine. By sharing tree medicine with non-trees, trees assume their unique identity as “trees” in the world. In the shamanic understanding, this is how everything works: rivers, eagles, roses, whales, forests, spiders, cliffs — each living thing embodying a unique combination of gifts, which are collectively known as its medicine.

In our human world, the same understanding applies. Each one of us harbors a unique combination of inner gifts, waiting to be discovered, drawn out, and developed. These gifts are the keys to unlocking our authentic identities: otherwise known as our medicine — the specific way we have a “healing” effect on the world. When we speak of someone being gifted, perhaps this is precisely what we mean: someone who’s put into practice their natural medicine, someone who’s therefore become a doctor of life.

In our current culture, we lack this ancient understanding, and so we get into trouble. We confuse the notion of gifts with the notion of privilege, and we lose ourselves in games of blame and shame, getting caught up in debates about external conditions. Privilege is essentially situational: a set of external conditions into which a person arrives, whether by birth or by experience. Gifts, on the other hand, are essentially latent potentials: inner qualities, talents, and predilections that we embody regardless of where we happen to be situated in the external world.

In the polarizing terms of our current “identity politics,” the focus is almost entirely on external conditions: socio-economic status, skin color, pronouns, gender, and sex. What if “identity politics” were re-imagined to focus less on external privilege, and more on internal gifts? Perhaps we could develop a system for supporting young people in identifying their own unique gifts, without being seduced by the shoulds of other people’s storylines. We could see these two potent questions as sacred:

• What makes me feel most alive when I do it?
• What makes the world respond with a “yes”?

Then, upon reaching adulthood, perhaps young people could be invited to choose a new name for themselves: a name that truly embodies their gifts. Certain common names indeed once arose in this way, with words like Baker, Sawyer, Smith, and Miller indicating their owners’ proclivities for working with bread, wood, silver, and wool.

Could a conscious naming process such as this help us to better align our gifts with our identities? Could it perhaps form the basis for a new kind of “identity politics”? Could it help us create a truly gifted society?

In this sixth ritual of In Fragments, I visit with nine beloved mentors and friends who gifted me with their unique perceptions of life, which in turn helped to shape my own.

I bring a small wooden box of linestones, and I invite each person to select the stone that speaks to them the most.

I dip my finger into the pile of gray powder that was produced in Not a Single Point and examined in Process of Elimination — and I gently draw a line of powder across each person’s face. This intimate gesture is a way of inviting each person’s spirit into the world of In Fragments, so they can benefit from whatever transformation and healing will later occur.

At the end of the film, I put a dab of white paint on my finger, and I draw a line across a sheet of glass in front of the camera, as a way of inviting the spirit of each viewer into the world of In Fragments as well.

The title of this ritual, Individuation, is inspired by Carl Jung’s notion of becoming a fully individuated self apart from the many voices of others — in other words, the process of discovering one’s own unique natural medicine.

Grateful for each of you.