archaeology, beauty, Mayan Culture, mythology, philosophy, research, spirituality, travel, writing

Travels In the Mayan Yucatan

In preparation for the publication of my novel, The Jaguar’s House,this will be the first in a four part series that explores the beliefs and traditions of the Ancient Maya.

Astonishing travelers! What noble stories we read in your eyes as deep as the seas! Show us the coffers of your rich memories, those marvelous jewels made of stars and ether.
We want to travel without steam, without sail! To enliven the tedium of our prisons, set sailing over our minds, stretched out like canvas, your memories with the horizon for their frame.
Tell us, what have you seen?

Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage”Travel Stories

On the Trail of Mayan Secrets

The Classic Mayan period of history in Mexico and Central America is unique in all the world and, as such, has captivated our imagination since we first became aware of them. What we’ve learned is only a small part of their story but one from which a vague outline of their civilization can be drawn. My intention in this series of articles will be to explore a few of their central concepts in an attempt to better understand what these highly intelligent people with very complex ideas believed about themselves, life and the gods, and from that, how they lived.

The road from the Cancun airport to the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza cuts so straight through the jungle that I imagined even the crows eye it with suspicion. I was in the interior of the Yucatan, land of the Maya. Their accomplishments were known to me from previous trips and 20 years of study. I’d just completed an historical novel about the Classic Maya and had returned to explore the astronomical beliefs associated with the observatory at the ruins of Chichen Itza.

Who were these people whose master mathematicians came up with the concept of zero, whose brilliant astronomers charted the heavens without the aid of modern technology, creating calendars as accurate as any in the Old World, who built architectural wonders in the Puuc region that Frank Lloyd Wright hailed as the best in the western hemisphere? I was determined to learn more about them and thought to spend time at each of the major archaeological sites on the peninsula delving into a different aspect of their cultural and spiritual beliefs at each place.

The drive passed through several small Mayan villages; traditional homes of wood and grass roofs, surrounded by gardens and low rock walls where the women wear hoichel — a white cotton dress with brightly colored embroidery around the neck and hem. Most people living in the villages of this area maintain the ancient way of life; they plant their corn with ceremony, conduct their families traditionally, and appoint a calendar-keeper, a daykeeper, to track the auspicious days and direct their lives.

By the time I reached the hotel at Chichen, the sun was just going down, and the night creatures were already singing in full voice. The songs of the night were far more elaborate than the day. Rather than the sporadic cheeps and rasps of insects with an occasional bird call, there was a seamless blend of voices. It seemed as if every unseen creature — of which there were millions — had a voice to contribute and didn’t hesitate to do so.

The Mayaland Hotel, built on the boundary of the ruins, has 100 acres of gardens that surround the main house and its outlying bungalows where the grounds are alive with birdsong and butterflies and exotic fruits and flowers of the tropics.

From the top of the steps of the hotel entrance I turned to look back, and my breath caught with delight. The ruins of the shell-shaped observatory named El Caracol by the Spaniards, rose in the golden glow of the setting sun like a beacon of mystery.

What must it have been like 1100 years ago when it was in its prime, a haven of scientific observation? Estimates suggest that as many as 50,000 people lived at the center at its peak around 900 AD. I could hardly wait to check in and go to the site. A private back-gate leads into the ruins where you’re free to walk in anytime between eight and five, and again for the light show at seven, fostering a sense that you too are one of the early explorers.

Fascinated with time and its relationship to events in their lives, the Maya became one of the first cultures to chart the passage of the stars in the heavens — with an accuracy that rivals modern technology. In fact, they were so intrigued with time that they built whole systems of thought around it. For hundreds of years they studied the sky and elaborated a complex system about the relationship between the gods and man. So practical are their beliefs that each day has a god. The qualities of that particular god inform the people how to relate to that day so that they may live with assurance that they’re in harmony with the will of the gods. They call it Hanab Ku.

Eight o’clock on the dot the next morning found me at the back-gate ready to explore the observatory before the tourist buses arrived. Today the road is lined with present day Maya selling their wares to the tourists. I approached the snail-shaped building, I imagined the area as it had once been; the temples brightly painted, the square paved and lined with trees where dozens of people went about their morning errands.

The circular superstructure consists of a lower story with radial shafts emerging from its center, and in the interior, a circular stairway rises to the top where more shafts located at precise compass points allowed the ancient astronomers to chart sunrises, sunsets, eclipses and planetary transits. From these observations they drew the heavens and from those charts they deciphered the passage of time.

Thus a complex system of calendars emerged; a system unique in human history for it deciphered millions of years into the past and thousands of years into the future, predicting a continual round of days with particular attributes. Armed with this information the priests could inform people both about their history and about what was to come. It was also used to make decisions about planting crops, about going to war, about times for rituals. In fact, the calendar was used for all decisions both cultural and individual. For example, on an inauspicious day, one might not travel to the market. When I say calendar, I’m over-simplifying because there are actually three calendars; each with a particular function that work together to create pin-point accuracy.

First there’s the solar calendar

of 365.24 days, which is straightforward to our way of thinking.

Then there’s the Ceremonial Calendar

which is entirely different but operates concurrently with the Solar; with a 20 day cycle, each day representing a different god with particular attributes. The attributes of the god make up the quality of the day. The days are also attached to 13 numbers. The 13 numbers are multiplied by the 20 day gods to make a 260 day cycle. This calendar was the more significant for the Classic Maya as they used it for divination and for decision making; both for matters of state and for personal choices. It was also called The Book of Good and Bad Days.

Then there is The Venus Calendar,

based on the transits of the planet Venus.

Time on earth was seen as cyclical

— with a beginning and an end –reflecting the spiritual belief that the world is continually created and destroyed. At the end of the long count of the calendar cycle the gods may decide that humans have fulfilled their vision for them and it will continue. However, if they have failed to please the gods, the creation will be destroyed. This concept also supported the ruler’s choice of action. For example, the best time to go to war would be at the end of a cycle.

When I wound back down the stairs to stand once again on the wide platform that supported El Caracol, I could just imagine an event when a priest stood at this very point after having predicted an eclipse, and the people bowed down in awe as it occurred on schedule. To be able to describe the secrets of the universe through their calculations must have been truly inspiring, and also reassuring.

Might this ability of the Mayan intellect be responsible in a fundamental way for the richness of the Classic Maya period for when people feel secure– and this knowledge would certainly have that effect– they’re more open, creative and productive.

gratitude, parenting, philosophy, spirituality, thanksgiving, writing

Everyday Gratitude

The Attack of the Turkeys. I’m not kidding.

Tennessee Valley is one of my favorite places to walk; a two mile valley that runs east/west to the beach just north of San Francisco. There’s a side path that goes through a horse pasture to an overgrown pond where I like to go looking for things to photograph. On this occasion a few months ago, as I was passing the horses, five very large, very angry turkeys blocked my way.

Ignorant of the ways of turkeys, I charged on through them thinking, mistakenly, that they’d back down, instead they surrounded me and with wildly, and incredibly strong beating wings, proceeded to beat me up. With nothing but the jacket I carried, I swung at them. However, I was also intend on documenting the event and continued to take photographs.

Above is some unknown part of the turkey as it was beating me with its wings which are incredibly hard and strong.

Since they were intend on blocking my path and would certainly do me harm, I was ready to give up and turn for home, when a ranger came and drove them off. They were guarding a nest of babies.

Tomorrow millions of people will eat turkey, myself included. A delicious bird that has come to symbolize our gratitude for the abundance in our lives. After more than 200 years of being prey on this day, it’s no wonder the creature is feisty.

I’m glad that there is a day assigned for giving thanks. I really do appreciate the gesture, however, each day we’re alive to experience the unfolding of life on this gorgeous, fragile, powerful, multi-faceted planet, is a day to celebrate. No matter what one believes about life after death, once dead, wherever we go from here, we will no longer be a part of life on this planet.

So I thank the turkeys for showing me something of their power and their willingness to put themselves at risk for the sake of their off spring; to remind me that

all life is moved to protect new life. It is how the creation assures it’s survival. It is a life force, not unlike gravity or time or space. It is called Love.

inspiration, parenting, psychology, spirituality, writing

First it’s about Human Rights.

The first step on the long climb is to recognize that if you are unable to allow freedom to others, you’ll never have it yourself. If my individual freedom encroaches on yours, that is not it. That is bullying. If I think freedom is doing as I please, I haven’t taken the first step but remain in a childlike mentality. It has taken us several thousand years to arrive at base camp; the oxygen hasn’t even begun to thin.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Ring any bells? That was 2000 years ago. How high have we climbed since then? It took the western world another 1800 years to take that first step and acknowledge the rights of others. And in many parts of the world today, there has been little or no progress in that regard.

When I acknowledge your need for freedom is as important as mine, I have begun to climb. It is not easy. Our brains are hardwired to be selfish; unless our early lives teach us to care for others, we won’t. Research on brain development is clear on this point; we are not naturally empathic, in fact it’s hard work to teach a child that the toy his friend has should not be taken from him. There will be tantrums, sulks, and continual efforts to get what they want, no matter what mommy and daddy say. Until months, and sometimes years later, the child learns that sharing is good. It has payback. The parents are happy with their child and the friend might even give the child what they want once the power struggle is over.

When we teach our children that they are the only ones, but are not the only ones who are the only ones, we help them take that first important step toward a free world.

Freedom is an attitude not a given.

It is a willingness to keep going up; to strive harder when it feels your lungs will burst; Paris bombing, Beirut bombing, Malta bombing . . . The second step requires us to be patient, be kind, be empathic, not just for our own but for those who’ve hurt us. When we want to strike back, as Gandhi said, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

Until we’re all free, none of us are. The age of terrorism is showing those of us who’ve lived in countries that profess freedom for their citizens that the illusion can be wrested from us. It isn’t even very hard. Just shoot a few people in a country that believes it’s free and suddenly, no one in that country can live with the illusion any longer. The borders close, the army comes in, and individuals are restricted in their movements. All gone freedom.

Freedom is not something one can have while another does not. Freedom is an attitude of inclusion, lacking that, the word is incorrect.

We must be still; stop our animal brain, breath and grieve. Trauma research among animals has shown that when an animal is hurt or shocked they sit still for awhile. Psychologists have integrated this information when working with people who’ve experienced a trauma and have found that by being still, even just for a few minutes, the individual is able to process the crises and move on.

Understanding those who’ve violated our freedom.

Moving on up the mountain to the freedom promised at the top, means understanding those who’ve threatened that freedom; to bring our intelligence to bare on what is outside of our reality. Like the problem of the child who wants someone else’s toy, some people have never learned the first step, so are handicapped and trapped in the reptilian brain of pain and selfishness, they take freedom from others. Ignorance is not an excuse but it is a reality.

For those of us still climbing toward the goal, meeting and sharing with others of like mind is a relief and a support. To sit in the crisp clear air and share our stories, our challenges, and our failures, gives courage to continue.

Humanity need not go the way of the dinosaurs and other species who failed to adapt. We are, however, awfully close to the brink of our own extinction. We must wake up, keep climbing, and prove we are worthy of living on this glorious planet. But for that to happen, we must learn to cooperate.

As the Buddhists say: No single person gets enlightened. Until we all go, no one goes. We are One.

childhood, health, life, parenting, psychology, spirituality, story, writing

How Stories Can Facilitate Psychological Health

Many years ago, when I’d been working as a therapist for several years, I came upon an ancient Greek tradition where people suffering from an illness (whether physical or mental) went to healing caves for a cure. At the site there were caves where the patient slept and then healers aided their patients in interpreting their dreams. A healing dream is a story that speaks in the language of symbol to directly impact the conscious mind. The key to the cure is that it is the unconscious that heals.

The greater part of my work with clients was working with their dreams, so this ancient process had great appeal for me. Excited to learn more, I literally went in search of the places where this had occurred and found the best example on Crete where the Minoans had once lived from 4000 to 1500 BC.

Thus began my 20 year fascination with a culture that appeared to have been amazingly balanced between the masculine and feminine principles. The Minoans are considered matriarchal but my research has shown me otherwise. Most scientists who’ve come across them have automatically classed them matriarchal because most cultures in that time period were. They hadn’t the vision to realize that everything in their art spoke to a highly developed consciousness. It was not one-sided.

I once heard that if we haven’t seen something before, we can’t see it at all. An example given was that when the first ships arrived on the east coast of the United States from Europe, the indigenous population couldn’t see the ships; they were invisible to them. It was the shaman who revealed these odd new forms to the people, which he could do since he traveled in the unconscious on a regular basis.

I knew by then that simply telling someone something goes in one ear and out the other; it has no real impact on the psyche, but stories do. Many great and small teachers over the years, realizing the powerful impact for change in parables, myths, fairytales and stories of all kinds, have used these tools to create a change in the point of view of the listener. There is no erase button in the psyche but there is an add button.

Keeping in mind that a story is a waking dream, I set out to tell the story of how a young girl was healed by her encounter with this culture that was based on feminine values; love, nurturance, connection, play, art, and beauty. I created a situation where a young person with a ‘bad’ mother was renewed and given hope for her life through her exposure to the ‘good’ mother. Her mother’s dark world was all she’d known, now she could see what had previously been invisible.

As a healer my job is to show people what they haven’t seen before. My favorite method for doing that is to tell them stories.

My novels, Echo the Ancients, and The Jaguar’s House, A Mayan Tale, were written with this in mind,.

childhood, health, life, psychology, spirituality, story, writing

Mothers Milk is Mother’s World.

The first truths are taught to us by our mothers.

They are the truths that support all others; the people I see, the earth at my feet, the plants and trees around me, the sky above, are neutral until given meaning, and the original meaning comes from her. Our mother gives us access to the world. Her beliefs are transferred to us like the formation of our first cells in her womb. We drink the milk from her breast and ingest her emotions, how she sees the world, and how she sees us.

This process happens before we have the consciousness to know that it’s happening. We are utterly dependent on this information to understand our world. We must have it just as we must have her milk. And then, worse yet, we forget. It is staggering how important this is. No wonder, we, both men and women, are both enraptured and frightened of the feminine. She does, in fact, have the greatest power. As the Indian Vedas say, She is the creator and the destroyer.

In the beginning, we see the world through our mother’s eyes not ours.

If we’re lucky enough to have a ‘good’ mother, she will also teach us to believe in ourselves; to find our own answers that may be different than hers; to constantly seek our own experience and meaning. In other words, she will point us back to ourselves, freeing us from the limitations of her mind and into the vastness of our own; she will nurture the creation of our own selves.

If we’re not so lucky and have a ‘bad’ mother (by bad I’m referring to a person whose limitations prevent them from nurturing our individuality) All of the above will happen, however, she will not point us back to ourselves. Instead of nurturing our unique world view, she will destroy it, insisting that hers is the correct way to see.

Fortunately, that’s not the end of the story. Our personal mother is not the only feminine force in the universe. As important as she is to our early life, many people with ‘bad’ mothers naturally turn toward Mother Nature.

A story I’ve heard over and over again from clients with difficult early home lives, is that they found such solace in nature; trees, birds, insects, animals, rivers, all became their friends where they would go to feel some aspect of nurturance. Because nature is not personal their needs for self awareness could not be satisfied, but they did feel momentarily better.

One of my earliest memories serves as an example:

I was five and had been following the creek down the side of the mountain, jumping from rock to rock in and out of quaking aspen that bent in close and, somewhere, sometime unbeknownst to me, led away from the cabin where I was staying with my mother, father and little brother. It led to a morning full of meadow.

I remembered the names of Columbine and Indian Paintbrush that I found there, but they were only a few among a myriad of other, as yet, unnamed mountain flowers and grasses that smelled both sour and sweet. It was beautiful beyond imagining. I thought that the many drops of lingering dew captured in the plants had been left by the stars the night before.

I was entrance, but also, realized I was lost. Suddenly I saw a fawn and its mother. I held my breath. The grasses came above the fawn’s legs as she pranced behind her mother. She didn’t know yet that her mother’s power was not hers. She owned it all. More than anything, I wanted to follow them across that wide expanse of wet wild wonder; that green and purple field of love, where snaking creek waters gurgled, murmuring soft phrases of reassurance.

As the doe ran ahead, the fawn followed, a delighted shadow yet to be solid in her own right. When the mother stopped and turned her head to her child, I saw her eyes; brown orbs of everything. I got up from where I’d collapsed on a piece of granite and ran toward them, but before I could catch up, the doe bounded through the barrier of trees, and her fawn, stopping a moment to feel me behind, leapt also.

At the spot where they’d disappeared, I found the creek. I knew if I followed the creek, I’d find our cabin. They’d showed me how to get back. I never told my parents about the meadow; I already knew they would take it from me.

The memory of that experience was so important to me as a child, I thought about it hundreds of times and would remember the details as clearly as I was able. Most summers our family returned to this place in the High Sierra’s of California. The first thing I would do when we arrived was to go in search of my lost place. I never found it again. As I grew older, I doubted that it had ever happened. I had taken on my mother’s dark view of life so fully by then that I called it a silly dream and stopped looking. However, though I didn’t actively look for it as I once had, I was always on the lookout for it.

childhood, health, life, parenting, psychology, story, writing

What parents need to know about growing a healthy child.

There has been a monumental change in human evolution. A new balance has emerged over the past decade HippyPollard family 1970 which sees father’s more and more involved in the raising of their children from infancy. With this newly found balance, children born today have a greater chance of psychological health than ever before.

As has been said before me, It takes a village. However, most of us in the modern western world don’t have a village. At most what we have is a mother and a father, and hopefully, a grandparent or two or four. But the core is, a mother and a father.

In conversation with my sister recently we were remarking on how involved her son in law is with the raising of his son; a story I hear regularly about new parents. Father’s today are changing diapers, getting up at night for the feeding of the infant. At the very least, they’re supporting their wives in the daunting task of caring for an infant. This was not the case when we were raising our children. Father’s at that time followed the example of their father’s before them; they went out in the world and left the raising of children to their wives. No matter how good a mother is, their child also needs a father.

Whatever the gender of a child is, to be balanced, the feminine and the masculine principles need nurturing, and sooner works better than later since the first three years form the core of identity.

Most of my work as a therapist is reparenting; simply put, the problems an individual faces as an adult usually arise from some aspect of early development that is missing. Though it’s true that abuses in childhood cause problems, what is more often the case, is that one or more areas of development got skipped. When both parents are involved in raising the child, there’s a better chance that one of them will be able to compensate for the limitations of the other, raising the possibility that the child’s needs will be attended to. It’s has also been said that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. I would be out of a job if that wasn’t the case. But it’s so much easier to do it right from the start and do away with my job.

As parents today are taking more responsibility for the health of their child; as they’re taking their jobs seriously, I’d be glad to see the end of the need for so much reparenting. But that time has not yet arrived since there’s so much cleanup to do for the failures of the last generation.

Colette Obrien

Tag Archives: evolution

Travels In the Mayan Yucatan