This blog is an excerpt from Chapter Seventeen, “The Return of the Green Man” from my book ,The Other Man in Me, Erotic Longing, Lust and Love: The Soul Calling.

Everything is energy (spirit). Everything is matter. It is only the mind and the illusion of time that separates them. I paint a horse coming out of the sea. My eye catches the word Mercurius in Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis and have a “feeling” there is some connection between it and my painting. Reading, I find Jung’s reference to “the steed that is in the water is risen up” as the union of spirit and matter. I dream that a man kills a black jaguar so that I can attend a university, and twenty years later find myself in a weekend training on shamanic healing where a black jaguar returns to me on a shamanic journey. I stare into the background of a painting and see a man holding a bowl with a feather as if bringing me the gift of a feather; in meditation a hand extends an owl feather to me; months later I walk out of a building at a training on shamanic healing and am met by a man extending an owl feather to me. I paint a painting of hands over a male figure, with an eagle looking on, and weeks later find myself going for my first shamanic healing session in Sedona, Arizona, where I am greeted by an eagle at the gate. In the healing session itself, the healer uses his hands over me, working in my energy field.

Years later I find myself taking training in energy medicine where hands are used to move energy. Owls show up in my dreams and paintings and owls cross my path as I travel to and from the airport, going and returning from trainings on shamanic healing and energy medicine. I dream that a woman is holding a bowl of stones, placing one in a river to heal the river. I paint the bowl of stones. A few days later I walk into my office and there is a bowl of round stones sitting on the file cabinet, almost exactly like the ones I had painted. And then sometime later I read “everyone’s got to do what the shamans call ‘cleaning up your river.’” I dream that I’m involved in the healing of a lady in Africa with shaman and mentor Ona Sachs, only to learn some days later that Ona was in fact involved in a healing with a lady from South Africa at the time of my dream.

Is to place meaning on these experiences and events as confirmation or guidance for my journey superstition and magical thinking, regression to some prerational stage of development? Or is it some transpersonal, transrational reality—the Return of the Green Man—archetypal masculine of a divine light and intelligence in matter renewing our lost unity with the world of nature?

As psychoanalyst or shaman, as gay, straight, bisexual, or any other label we may attach to ourselves, we must value what our journeys through our various experiences show us and say to us. Then we must accept the challenge of holding the space where opposing, powerful, and equally sovereign forces collide on their way to the transformation and healing of the soul, whether that soul be mine, yours, or the Soul of the World.

Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph, D., in his book The World of Shamanism: New View of an Ancient Tradition says that “[c]learly we have much to learn from what shamans do—the myths they live by, the training they undergo, the techniques they use, the crises they confront, the capacities they develop, the states of consciousness they enter, the understandings they gain, the visions they see, and the cosmic travels they make. The more we explore shamanism, the more it points to unrecognized potentials of the human body, mind, and spirit. For untold thousands of years the world of shamanism has helped, healed, and taught humankind, and it still has more to offer us.”[1]

I find myself on this journey with the Green Man. Together we venture into his world of nature, into the world of the shaman, into the world of energy medicine, into the world of the healer, into the world of my own soul as indicated by the dream with which I started this chapter, my own healing and that of the world. For in healing ourselves, we heal our families. In healing our families, we heal our communities. In healing our communities, we heal the world. It begins with each individual being willing to look into the depths of his or her soul and see what is hidden there, what images long to be brought out into the light of consciousness, embraced, and held with the imaginal sight of the heart.

These images come to us. We think that we create them. We think that we make them up. But they come to us from the depths of our souls. They come to us from the World Soul. We try to think them when we should dance them, paint them, love them, befriend them, and allow them to carry us into their worlds to learn their stories—stories that will once again connect us to the subtleties of spirit that we have long forgotten—the subtleties of spirit that connect us all.

To read more about the Green Man and my journey into shamanism, check out my book, The Other Man in Me, Erotic Longing, Lust and Love: The Soul Calling at https://www.amazon.com/Other-Man-Me-Longing-Calling/dp/1098334981/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=The+Other+Man+in+Me&qid=1611448294&sr=8-1 or download the Introduction: Homosexuality and the Soul’s Longing at https://www.sheldonshalley.com/book-excerpt-download.

[1] Walsh, World of Shamanism, 271.