Tamed By a Bear. Priscilla Stuckey
As I listened to Bear’s voice, my own voice began to shift—growing lighter during each session, a shift plainly audible over the course of each recording. Many mornings I woke up too early, at three or four, feeling jangled, trying hard to restore some sense of peace and fall asleep again. Sometimes it worked, but often it didn’t, leaving my voice at the start of a Journey later that morning still sounding heavy, questing. Yet without fail, after only ten or twenty minutes of chatting with Bear I would lighten up, my voice easier, more amused. Bear, I discovered, was nudging me toward a more cheerful frame of mind.
It took only a few weeks for Tim to start commenting on the change. “You seem happier,” he said. He was right. Though the prospect of moving was staring us in the face, and though Tim was still deep in the throes of career change and I was bringing in practically no money so that family finances looked worse than terrible, and though I had no idea where this Journey practice was heading and no clue how I might be able to earn a living—or when—my outlook was indeed becoming more cheerful. How could it not? I was hanging out with a perpetually cheerful Bear who seemed to think that the purpose of life is to enjoy it. Under Bear’s influence, I was beginning to enjoy it more too.
Buoyed by the changes I could feel happening within, I looked forward to my almost-daily time with Bear. That sense of communion, that feeling of Bear like a warm cloak around my shoulders—every time I returned to it helped me nestle a little more firmly within its sanctuary.
However, just because I was receiving a sense of warm support from communing with Bear, a feeling that I was hearing and being heard, doesn’t mean that the Journeys flowed naturally from the start. Much of the time in those early weeks I felt that I was taking lessons in a foreign language, trying to shape my mouth around an awkward “Hello! . . . How . . . er . . . are . . . you?”
One day I noticed that a Journey flowed more easily if I kept my attention a little lighter, like floating across the top of a river’s currents instead of staring hard into the water, studying each eddy, trying to figure out where to navigate next. The habit of watching the river a little too closely only yielded a ponderous, slow conversation. Slipping into that heavy mental focus seemed to be one of the ways in which, as Chris liked to say, “we get our own fingers in the mix.” The mind begins to think it has to work hard, and instantly the magic is gone; one no longer feels buoyed up by friendly forces. If I started to work too hard, it was likely a signal that my own mind, not my Helper, had begun to direct the flow. Giving my Helper a freer rein meant bringing a lighthearted, even playful, spirit to the process—a spirit of trust, a spirit of fun. Journeys were meant to be enjoyable, to feed the soul.
But at the same time, skimming across the surface of a river of pretty thoughts or concepts was not flowing with the Helper either. It was a mind sailing away on a frothy feeling and losing all connection to the heart. I had to stay simpler than that.
“No fancy thinking,” Bear said. “Following one of those tempting, beautiful trails can get in the way of simplicity.” The best thing to do, if I felt myself about to spin away on a gorgeous thought, was to pause and breathe, to come back to the body, back to the heart. To focus again on my Helper. “It doesn’t take fancy mental dance moves,” Bear said. “More simple, more love. Which is also more open.”
That’s why, Bear explained, coming back to the body is always a good thing to do. “Compassion for the body and for the material world is a sure foundation,” he said. Was I trying to ignore the body, or was I opening fully, with love, to all its physical weaknesses? “Accepting what is in each moment—that is the greatest simplicity,” Bear said. “It’s a good way to check,” he added, “that one is seeing clearly.”
Trying to master the grammar of this new language, hoping to become fluent, I practiced keeping my attention focused yet open and light, in that Goldilocks place of “just right.”
10
Bear, I soon discovered, was a fan of being oneself, whoever that self happened to be. “One needs to live from that foundation of knowing the beauty of spirit within oneself,” Bear said one day in early April. To find one’s place in the world, he recommended settling deeper into one’s own skin: “Feeling one’s worth, one’s infinite worth.” Bear suggested that each person needs to come home to their own heart, come home to the Great Heart—different ways of talking about the same thing, the essential thing: “Feeling at home. Here. As oneself.”
When a person pursues an identity that may not be quite right for them, he said, “it’s not the thing itself they want but the side benefits they imagine go with it—the respect or awards or money. Purity of purpose lies in wanting the thing itself, loving the activity rather than the things that go with it.” Wanting side benefits could extend to something as subtle as wanting to find a place in the world. “One can even want the path,” he said, “and yet within the wanting resides this deeper yearning to have a place in the world.”
“You’re talking about me, aren’t you?” I said. I was beginning to recognize Bear’s respectful, indirect way.
“It’s bigger than just you,” he replied. “The thing that needs to be addressed is a person’s place in the world. One gets more solid in one’s sense of place by following the way that’s right for them, the very unique way.”
Different people would come up against different challenges in trying to find their own place, he added. “For one person, it might mean treasuring the beauty of spirit within. For another, allowing oneself to be more comfortable in the physical world.”
Then Bear paused. “For you,” he said, “it might have to do with communion. Dwelling in the sense of back-and-forth.”
A week or so later Bear returned to the theme of uniqueness. “Nature—reality—values individual variation,” he said one morning. Then he repeated, “Nature loves yet another version. But not in the sense of a stale, repeated version. Something new. Something marvelous.” One only has to look out the window, he suggested, to glimpse this flowering of endless variety.
All of nature’s experimenting, Bear went on, adds up to a picture of continuously unfolding possibility. “It gives people the biggest freedom to pursue that which is theirs,” he said. “Among the Helpers,” he added, “there is a great respect for individuality.”
11
As I groped my way forward in Journeys, I began to let go of trying too hard to figure them out and started to relax more easily into the communion. A feeling began to creep over me—a feeling that I had known how to do this long ago, that talking with unseen realms was familiar in some way that only the deepest-down, longest-buried part of me remembered. I was being delivered back to the land of my birth, back to my native tongue. It was a language I’d barely learned to speak before I’d been snatched away from it all too soon—by rows and files of desks in school, by trying to be like my friends, by succeeding in the work of the mind. My adult life, I was beginning to see, had been a story of exile.
It’s not that as a child I enjoyed extraordinary experiences of communing in some special way with spirit. My experiences were the common kind, a moment here or there when the world discarded its usual garb and suddenly glowed in a new costume. Many children, perhaps all children, are shown such secrets. Some glimpse a shining world hidden just behind everyday sight or enjoy the feeling of being watched over by someone bigger than their parents. Some have an imaginary friend, like the comic strip character Calvin’s stuffed tiger who, out of sight of other people, snaps to vivid life.
In my case, I rarely played with dolls and had only a few stuffed animals, none of which ever came alive for me. I never saw the shining world, at least as a child, and I couldn’t quite place God either, though I did have the sense that the world is more mysterious than we know—that the birch tree in my yard might one day whisper secrets, that birds might be telling stories in their songs.
From time to time I enjoyed a dreamy state that I could sink into when the house was quiet, perhaps sitting beside a window on a rainy day and watching moisture gather into droplets on the glass, a droplet here or there growing heavier and