Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The Medicine Wheel is a widely known aspect of many Indigenous American traditions. As its name suggests, it has been used as a healing modality that honors life’s directions and cycles, yet it may be a technology that helps its practitioners find harmonic balance and spiritual insight within relationship of the key elements of complex life events. At the heart of the Medicine Wheel is a core symbolism of the circle and the cross aligning with the four cardinal directions. Its use in connecting micro and macro realities may represent universal harmonic patterns that play out through diverse phenomena that tend to include sequences of four. Such natural phenomena include the traditional elements (earth, water, air, fire), seasons of the year (autumn, winter, spring, summer), and conscious realms of the human being (physical, emotional, mental, spiritual). Explorations in modern understanding may be crucial in applying the unifying principle of this practice, where human anatomy finds connective tissue in both the four lobes of the brain and the four chambers of the heart. While Indigenous American mythology is perhaps the most common source of the Medicine Wheel’s wisdom, amplitudes of resonant symbolism and unified orientation exist among ancient cultures that include the Egyptian Kemetic, Siberian Shamanic, Celtic Druidic, and Gnostic Christian traditions. In this workshop, founded scientific and psychological connections put forth by the likes of Aristotle, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Carl Jung are called to life for interaction among the traditional natural elements and symbols of present consciousness.