The Medicine Wheel Will Empower Your Consciousness with Real Time

Working with the Medicine Wheel is a joyful direct experience. Is it not time for you to feel directly connected to life?

Wherever you are, the sun rises in the East. This is universally true. 

The beginning of your day is tied to the movement of the Sun. Your body is conditioned by the Sun’s apparent movement through the sky. The circadian rhythm, which brings the need to sleep, is linked to natural light. The day, which is created by the Sun’s presence, is the essential unit of our shared social reality. The economic day is also largely tied to the Sun. The first cause of the cycles of our society and of all life on Earth is tied to the Sun’s cycle. 

Now, we do know scientifically that the Earth is moving around the Sun and that the Sun is moving around the Galaxy, but your body is not interested in this detached perspective. Your body is at the centre of its physical universe. Everybody is at the centre of their own universe.

The day begins with the Sun's appearance in the East, a point in space, together with the moment which is the time we call dawn. Time and Space as one.

Wherever you are, the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. In the Northern Hemisphere (which dominates the Southern Hemisphere at present), the Sun is at its highest point of the sky towards the South, around noon, and is at its lowest point in the North, beneath the horizon, around midnight (in the Southern Hemisphere, this is North and South, respectively).

At midnight, the light of the Sun is further away from us – it is dark and we can see millions of other stars of the cosmos all around us.

The Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere is the point when the Sun is furthest away from us, giving us the shortest day and the longest night. The word solstice is derived from the Latin sol (Sun) and sistere (to stand still). At the solstices, the seasonal movement of the Sun's path (as seen from Earth) comes to a stop before reversing direction.

The Sun is at its lowest path in the sky on the Winter Solstice. After that day the Sun follows a higher and higher path through the sky each day until it is in the sky for exactly 12 hours. On the Spring Equinox the Sun rises exactly in the East, travels through the sky for 12 hours and sets exactly in the West. On the Equinox, this is the motion of the Sun through the sky for everyone on earth. Every place on Earth experiences a 12-hour day twice a year, on the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes. After the Spring Equinox, the Sun still continues to follow a higher and higher path through the sky, with the days growing longer and longer, until it reaches its highest point in the sky on the Summer Solstice. 

In simple terms, the proximity of the Sun to the Earth gives us our seasons. Our seasons provide us with major components of our context for our physical and emotional experience of reality. You do have a yearly cycle – a seasonal fluctuation of physical, emotion and mental energy. Your social life is flavoured very strongly by the seasons.

The Medicine Wheel locates YOU in time and space. It orientates you physically to the natural world and to our Star, the Sun. Empirical. Real. Basic, undeniable truth. The Medicine Wheel locates you in time–space.

The clock orientates you in linear time, but not space. As far as your body is concerned – and therefore your basic feeling – the linear time measurement of the clock is not as real as the Sun’s time; the body knows the Sun clock. The Sun’s daily cycle is real time.

The satnav in your car can sometimes help you locate yourself in space, but not in time – certainly not real time.

The Medicine Wheel brings time and space together as one unified reality and is therefore a higher dimension of that which is absolutely physically real. It is so obvious that it is hidden. We forget it, as is so obviously creating the basic parameters of our life that we feel we do not really need to fully register it – it is taken care of, and this frees the mind up to engage with the social rhythms and – unfortunately – to partially disconnect from the fundamental physical reality.

The Medicine Wheel is the fundamental of all Shamanism. Shamanism was born from real needs in the real physical world – the need for food, shelter, understanding of nature and of animals, plants and the weather, as well as the need for healing and community within the natural environment. 

This same basic need to live in reality led to more sophistication from observing the movement of the planets and stars. This was astronomy and astrology together.

The astrology chart also locates you in your empirically provable centre of physical reality in relation to the planets of the Solar System.

Science provides proof that there is a larger reality, not just based on our physical experience. However, your physical foundation, your survival, vitality and health, is based on acknowledging that your body is at the centre of its universe. What science provides, rather paradoxically, is the reality of the mental planes, not the physical plane we directly experience. Science is the truth of observing the physical world from the rational or mechanistic linear mind; it is not the truth of physical experience we can see or feel; it is not the reality of the immediate world of the senses. Science is removed. 

The next stage of evolution of our awareness is to acknowledge the value of the rational tool, yet to also come back to the natural experiential truth, to integrate with the larger context of our existence. I will not elaborate further upon this here, but by studying the Enchantments of Life you can see this clearly for yourself.

The Shamanic science of the Medicine Wheel is based on actual experience, honed through trial and error.

The Medicine Wheel provides with us a fractal of the day, the year and the life cycle. The Medicine Wheel gives us access to the Holographic Universe, the multidimensional reality of consciousness.

Here is a very basic outline of the four directions.

East, from where the Sun rises, is the birth of your day, the birth of all things including yourself, the Spring Equinox, the spirit of new things appearing in our life.

South, from where the Sun shines strongest, is midday, the Summer Solstice, the acknowledgement and celebration of all things growing to adulthood, the peak of growth, the manifest.

West, from where the Sun sets, is the evening, the Autumn Equinox, the contemplation and the understanding of life, maturity and wisdom.

North, from where the Sun rests, is midnight, the Winter Solstice, the end of the year and the beginning of the next year, death and conception, the point of the impulse for rebirth.

These four directions are gateways, portals, entrances or doorways. If you want to connect to the visible and invisible environment, then you need to evoke the portals of consciousness, based on reality, that give you direct conscious connection. By acknowledging the structure of the day, the year and the natural life cycle of all things, we acknowledge the separations, the boundaries and therefore the boundary gateways or portals. 

Until the gateways are acknowledged, you cannot consciously and directly connect to creation, to existence.

The simplicity of this can and does yield books and books of explanation, but you can only 'get it' if you do it.

My work has developed and is born from direct experience and daily practice. My daily practice of years and years of working with the Medicine Wheel as the foundation for exploring energy, the environment and consciousness, led me to be able to consciously connect to the instinctive connection we all have with nature. Eventually, it led me to be able to connect to the totality of the Earth as a living being, which includes all human artefact and all culture, as part of the complex living systemic spirit of our planet.

My shamanic practice today, and the shamanic sessions I offer, all incorporate the evocation of the directions. Evoking the directions allows us to access the living cosmos we exist within.