Every relationship of any depth or duration comes to one or several west shields, periods of tension or crisis with an opportunity to expand, iterate or evolve.
Some relationships continually back off from this point because one or both people aren’t available or willing. That’s OK. Not every relationship has to explicitly name its movements of toward and away. Maybe gentle continual connection and tenderness is enough. Many relationships end after one or several west shield moments, before co-creative contribution can emerge. That’s OK, too. Maybe it’s not OK if everyone is lonely, stuck and unwilling to ever submit to the prescient descent though.
The indigenous medicine wheel uses the four directions as a philosophy to speak to the different parts and phases of being human. When we’re in balance with the different directions, we are in good health and have enough. There is the small caveat that this individual model of health is contained in a healthy culture that respects the Earth and other mysteries.
There are four directions or four shields. There are many associations with each one and they vary amongst different places and tribes.
The south shield is childhood and the physical body.
The west shield is adolescence and the psychological body.
The north shield is adulthood and the intellectual body.
The east shield is elderhood and the spiritual body.
The west shield is where the vision fast or rite of passage into adulthood happens. The wounds of childhood are painstakingly confronted so that a person can then grow up and give back. It’s said that Western culture is stuck in adolescence or the West Shield.
The medicine wheel is a cyclical and nonlinear model of human development. We go from shield to shield through community-based ceremony, practice and ritual in different phases of life but we also encounter the different shields in a year, a month, a week, a day, or an hour. We also experience them in our relationships to people, place, profession and communities.
When we aim to align with Turtle Island’s Land Back movement, we are aligning with the indigenous wisdom that aligns with and respects the Earth’s cyclical wisdom.