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The Monthly Aspectarian: Running Wolf, I usually like to start by asking people to briefly tell their story. How did you evolve into who and what you are now?

Running Wolf: When I was 5 years old I had a very serious illness and my mother called upon our Creator to intervene on my behalf. She surrendered me to the service of our Creator, to do whatever is required if I would be healed, so I was healed that night. I still remember waking up and from that point on I've been able to communicate with spirit people, with the spirit helpers, and also to see the spirit of animals around us. In accordance with Native American tradition, that's actually pretty much the norm for medicine people. How they're identified is that they have some sort of dramatic experience at the age of 5, which allows them to be able to see both realms; the spirit realm as well as the physical.

TMA: I imagine that was recognized and you began training?

RW: I did my first hands on healing when I was 17. My life has been a steady progression of developing my abilities and my medicine knowledge, as well as learning how to live in mainstream society, so that not only can I practice whatever is needed for the benefit of the Cherokee people, for Native Americans in general, but also non-Indians. That's been quite a challenge, actually. One of the requirements of being a medicine person, whether you're a man or a woman chosen by our Creator, is you have to allow yourself to become movable emotionally and spiritually. That's the term that best describes what the state of being is. It's a place of being willing and open to receive the energy and influence of our Creator's spirit and spirit helpers. The downside is that mainstream society is geared towards exploiting other people for personal gain. Often myself and many other medicine people I know--Cherokee and otherwise—have been subjected to exploitation and abuse. But we all seem to manage and recover and keep moving forward.

TMA: What's the nature of the exploitation and abuse you're talking about?

RW: When people coming from mainstream society are looking for a spiritual path, there's usually two different motivations. One of them is they're honestly and sincerely seeking to connect with Creator and grow and evolve in such a manner that they can be of good service to our Creator and to the community. The other, which unfortunately seems to the be the most popular, is looking for power. In mainstream society, people have been indoctrinated that in order to get ahead, in order to be "safe," you have to have power. So people come looking for power and unfortunately a lot of them are willing to do whatever it takes to get it. That winds up causing a lot of trouble and difficulty.

One example is I had this one couple where the woman was dying of ruptured breast implants. She had come here to Northern New Mexico to die, because the doctors had told her that there was no hope. Shortly after getting here she found out about me and came and asked for help. I looked into it and found it was okay for me to go ahead and help her. This included being able to give birth to a healthy child. She had never been able to have children because of the ruptured silicone and she had had a lot of miscarriages. She was in her 40s. Immediately after getting what she wanted, she went back to her fundamentalist Christian attitude and just started demeaning and degrading me like you wouldn't believe. Her husband also acted out very exploitive behavior, too. They got what they wanted and so off they went.

TMA: That's just a case of stupidity and bad manners. We were talking about people trying to exploit Native American teachings for their own purposes. The point I was going to make is that people seeking power are willing to exploit any of the traditions. It's not unique to Native Americans.

RW: That's true.

TMA: Twenty five years ago you had people claiming that they were doing Tibetan things and there was nobody from Tibet around to contradict them. All of the old ways " people calling themselves Druids " come on, there are no Druids.

RW: None living that I'm aware of.

TMA: Power seekers generally end up acquiring just enough power to burn themselves pretty good.

RW: It's sad to watch that happen. In the process of the training program that we have, I put a lot of time and energy and effort into assisting people. I do believe in the potential of everyone and I believe in giving everyone who comes into Good Way a chance. That's the way the spirit helpers I work with believe. We do our best to give everyone an opportunity to look at the parts of themselves that need to be let go of, and the changes that need to be made so that they can move forward in right relationship with their Creator and the rest of creation. Unfortunately some of them don't make it. It hurts when you see that happen. But everyone makes their own choices and you have to respect that.

TMA: I'm happy to see that you are of the school that accepts people from all races into the teaching.

RW: I've heard a lot of Native Americans claiming that we're all one relation, we're all family, but yet the incongruity to that is that they don't actually practice it. In Cherokee society, in our culture, we do believe that we are all children of our Creator, and we have to treat each other as such regardless of our heritage, regardless of our background, because ultimately we all come from the same origin.

TMA: Racism is racism, even if you come from a group that has been mistreated.

RW: I see a lot of "reverse racism." That's just adopting the darknesses of the culture that oppresses, and that's not appropriate behavior as far as I'm concerned. That applies to the the treatment of women as well. In the Cherokee society, men and women were considered to be equal in all things, but our mainstream society doesn't practice that. Unfortunately, some Native American cultures have adopted that attitude to some degree. Women on their moon time have gone from being a period in a where they can choose between being by themselves, taking time for themselves, or going ahead and assisting family and community, to the place where now a lot of Native Americans view women on their moon time as being dirty and unclean. That's not the way it was meant to be. It wasn't that way before, according to the old ways. That's the negative influence towards women that has come from mainstream society. I'd like to see that changed.

TMA: If you're going to adopt things, you can make better choices than that.

RW: Choice is what ultimately brings to us the consequences that we like and the consequences that we dislike. Everything we think and everything we say and everything we do does go out and it does come back around, not only as an individual, but as a group in the consciousness level as a group whole. Part of the reason that we're in so much trouble right now as a nation is because the United States consumes 80% of the world's resources. It's that looking out for our own interests that has caused us to make a lot of enemies out there. My father was career military, so I grew up in several countries throughout the world in my teen years, as well as being in Oklahoma. We went back and forth from the Midwest to Europe. So I grew up being exposed to these anti-American riots and anti-American demonstrations, seeing the hostility that other cultures have against the United States.

When a nation takes so much without giving back to the world to maintain that balance, it's going to create animosity. You create an imbalance. Cherokee tradition is all about teaching people how to be in balance in all things -- how to be in what we call a "right relationship" not only with our Creator, but with the rest of creation, and that includes our neighbors here and around the world because we are one family. If we're not helping out, if we're not looking out for the children and the poor around the world as well as here in the United States, then ultimately that's going to have a negative impact on us as a society.

TMA: I think our current problem with the radicals within the Islamic world points out the fact that we can't remain indifferent any longer.

RW: Unfortunately, here in the United States indifference is very strong.

TMA: The larger problems I trace back to corporatism, and the antidote is enlightened individualism. It's up to us to help individuals awaken and start making the correct choices. Most people in the world have been driven by "foolish self-interest." Enlightened self-interest realizes that what's good for everybody is good for me.

RW: Well, there you go. That pretty much covers it. If everyone benefits, I guess they call that the win-win scenario.

TMA: It's in our own enlightened self-interest to help our neighbors. It's really not how America lives that's the problem, it's the way it's obtained. It's obtained foolishly, and it doesn't have to be. What I find interesting from the indigenous people that I have spoken with around the world, the rainforest shamans and so forth, is that there are ways to connect to the earth. There is technology for cooperating with the earth, connecting with it and humans working with the planet for the healing of the planet.

RW: I put that as equally important as getting people to become emotionally responsible. Those two things must go hand in hand. Based on my own experience, the reason people choose putting their own self interest ahead of their neighbor's or the greater community, is because they fundamentally lack reverence and respect.

TMA: They haven't been taught. They don't know better.

RW: They lack that honest and sincere relationship with a Power greater than themselves. Unless people realize that they must rely on something more powerful than themselves, then that arrogance and self-righteousness takes over and causes people to make unfortunate choices.

TMA: Clearly our bodies, if not our spirits, are of the earth itself, and we have to learn to work in harmony with it. They tell us that the planet is overpopulated, but the planet can support ten times the current population if we work in harmony with her.

RW: I'm glad to hear you say that because I know from my education and experience, yes, we can feed many times more than what we have now.

TMA: If we'll learn to work rightly with her.

RW: We do have the knowledge and abilities to work in harmony with the earth and with one another. We have to work in harmony with one another in order to be able to work together in harmony with the earth. That's where the sense of community needs to be re-established. When I talk about community, I'm talking about a healthy environment, a healthy community, not a community where people are ignored or there's a caste system or there's exploitation of the weak or the vulnerable. Everyone is valuable. Everyone can make a contribution regardless of who they are. Until people accept that, healthy communities cannot exist. In a state of healthy community, where we''re learning how to treat each other with reverence and respect and dignity, we can work together in harmony with the earth, not only for feeding the people, but also for helping people raise the quality of life. Quality of life, to me, is a very good goal; improving the quality of life for everyone, not only just myself or the individual, but for everyone across the board. You know the old adage, "we're only as strong as the weakest link." When we allow someone in our culture and our society as a whole to live in a poor state or quality of life, then we are all demeaned.

TMA: But you know quality of life is connected with quality of being. Quality of life goes up in direct proportion to quality of being, so for myself, my own mission is to help people grow and enhance that quality of being within themselves.

RW: That's very good. In that regard I do encourage people. But most people don't know what they can do to change that, or unfortunately they don't care enough to want to change it. And so there has to be that empathy. People have to develop empathy for one another, and the way to start doing that is by teaching the children. From the cognitive development standpoint, the development of empathy happens in the teen years. So we have to make a concerted effort as communities, as schools, as spiritual communities, as spiritual centers, churches, whatever you have, that when the kids get to become teenagers, to really expose them to the necessity for empathy and what empathy is and put them in situations where they can learn to have empathy towards others. That will assist them in having the courage to look at those parts of themselves that they need to change in order to be helpful, not only to themselves, but to everyone else.

TMA: What do you think Cherokee and Native American spirituality?this is such a broad question--what does it have to teach?

RW: What we have to teach, from my experience and my perspective, is twofold. Native American spirituality is a way of life. It's not something to do on weekends or on Sundays or when we're writing out a check to some charity. It's the way we live, our attitude towards ourselves, towards mother earth, towards our neighbors and our community as a whole. We teach people how we are not the center of the universe. We teach people how we are a part of the entire universe, and that as a part of the entire universe we have to help maintain the balance of the universe through our daily actions. Everything we do even at the smallest, minutest level has a direct impact on the rest of creation.

We also, in Native American spirituality, realize and teach that we, as human beings, don't have power, spiritual power. We ourselves do not have it. It comes from our Creator to those who are willing to humble themselves before our Creator to acknowledge that our Creator is the one who gifts spiritual ability, spiritual power, so that we know it's not of us, it's from God. That's the aspect we teach. Our meditations teach us how to think in a manner that manifests and uplifts our fellow human beings. There is no such thing as lack. When we're in harmony, we have all that we need, and whatever our goal is, whatever our purpose is, everything is provided for us. How that's done, we find out as we go, but it is done. There are a lot of ceremonial practices that we use as tools to maintain a relationship with our creator because, you know, it is a maintenance plan. It's something you have to do everyday--when you're talking about quality of life, it's the quality of your spiritual life.

TMA: Quality of being.

RW: Quality of being. We recognize that we're spiritual beings as well as human beings, and so we have to work daily making sure that those things are taken care of.

TMA: I have to laugh when I hear people talking about how we're destroying the earth. The earth is in no danger of destruction from us. She's going to shake us off like a bad case of fleas if we don't get our act together.

RW: Yes, that's the key right there, if we don't get our act together, we will be removed.

TMA: That's one of the places where I see indigenous technologies across the board as very powerful, as we get people in the developed world to properly respect the mother and work with her. I believe that all this damage that's been done to her, she could heal in an afternoon without spilling a teacup if she wants to. If we will respect and love her enough, she'll be motivated to do it.

RW: That does have to take place. The Mother does have the ability to heal things on her own time schedule. But in addition to the physical harm that we cause is the thought harm. We manifest our own growth and prosperity or we manifest our destruction as a whole, as a community. It can happen right down to the small towns getting flooded out or getting huge amounts of snow piled on them, up to asteroids impacting on the earth and wiping out entire populations. We had a near miss a couple of years ago, and that was kind of a wake up call. There was a huge asteroid that passed between the moon and the planet earth, and nobody even saw it until it was already on its way by.

TMA: If you look at humanity's oldest stories, we've been knocked down before and it could certainly happen again.

RW: Attitudes of reverence and respect for the sacredness of life, towards each other as valuable human beings, can alter energetically the course of asteroids or whatever. All these things can be changed just through thought and through the energy we project. But if we're constantly focusing on our dramas and our melodramas and who did this and who did that, we manifest our own self destruction.

TMA: We live in the wake up times. It's time to grow up.

RW: The Cherokee calendar has just entered a period where community must be re-established or there's going to be a massive amount of pain and suffering.

TMA: But we still have the opportunity to turn it around at this point.

RW: We do, and that's really what's key right now. There is that opportunity. What I do is help people understand the opportunity that's in front of them and the importance of grabbing hold of that opportunity with both hands. We do have the opportunity for setting aside the pain and suffering, setting aside the darknesses that have been done and that are being done. By changing ourselves, and in so doing bringing communities back together again, we help lift each other up, not only here in the United States, but around the world.

TMA: It's got to be global.

RW: Five thousand years ago the Cherokee prophecies were given telling about what was going to come in this time line if people continued in the same attitude and behaviors that they had. We knew about the Europeans coming to North America 5,000 years ago. All that happened. At the last century, right at the turn of the last century, the prophecies were given specifically that if things don't change we're going to have World War I. If people don't learn from that, we're going to have World War II. And if people don't learn from that, we're going to have World War III.

TMA: That one won't be pretty.

RW: What has to happen by the end of this decade is people do have to wake up, they do have to start saying okay, I am not more important than my neighbors, my brothers, my sisters, my parents, my minister, my spiritual leader or whoever. I am equal to them, and it is my responsibility to change my attitudes, to change my behaviors, to deal with that emotional baggage that I'm holding onto so that I can start lifting people up instead of tearing them down. It has to take place, and it has to take place real soon.

TMA: It's time to focus on our commonalities rather than our differences. To come together for the sake of all.

RW: In our culture, we believe there are many paths up the mountain, but when you get to the top, the view is still the same. As long as people are honoring the sacredness of the spirituality given by our Creator to different communities, as long as they're respecting that, then we can all work together.

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