Swimming with Elephants Read online

  “This is an exceedingly vulnerable, beautifully written book and the most genuine spiritual memoir I have ever read. It is also—in many hilarious moments—laugh-out-loud funny.”

  —Maria Bamford, comedian and star of Netflix original series Lady Dynamite

  “I loved this book. Sarah takes us on an intimate tour of the Hero's journey. She's a brilliant storyteller—making sense of the baffling journey from the ordinary world into the mystical and back again. I didn't want it to end.”

  —MeiMei Fox, New York Times bestselling author

  “This is a fascinating, amusing, and wise account of how someone born with a shaman's predilections, raised in a rationalist culture, finds her way back to her true self.”

  —Martha Beck, New York Times bestselling author

  “Sarah Bamford Seidelmann has amassed heaps of wisdom in her courageous leap from the safe realm of medical science into the unknown—the world of spirit. In this incredibly honest and compassionate memoir, you feel as though you're soaking in her courage and wisdom on every page. Even better, you do so laughing.”

  —Jaimal Yogis, author of Saltwater Buddha and All Waves Are Water

  “From the lakes of Minnesota to the Ganges river in India, Sarah Seidelmann's transformative journey from MD to shamanic healer is a refreshingly honest and very funny tale of spiritual growth.”

  —Matt Adrian, author of The Guide to Troubled Birds

  “A glittering, honest account of what it means to search and also to find. If you are a dreamer or an overworked parent, if you are someone who recognizes the magic in animals or wonders what it would be like to make a truly bold choice even if you are halfway down your life's path, please pick up this beautiful book!”

  —Sara Corbett, coauthor of the New York Times bestselling A House in the Sky

  “A poignantly honest journey which beckons us all. Sarah Seidelmann takes us right along with her through the looking glass and out the other side into a magical reality that pulses with life, adventure, and intelligence.”

  —Llyn Roberts, award-winning author and acclaimed teacher of healing and shamanism

  “Swimming with Elephants is an entertaining and moving front-row seat in the drama that unfolds when a western trained physician does the work required to become a true healer.”

  —Christiane Northrup, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Goddesses Never Age

  Also by Sarah Seidelmann

  Born to FREAK: A Salty Primer for Irrepressible Humans

  The Book of Beasties: Your A-to-Z Guide to the Illuminating Wisdom of Spirit Animals (May 2018)

  This edition first published in 2017 by Conari Press, an imprint of

  Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

  With offices at:

  65 Parker Street, Suite 7

  Newburyport, MA 01950

  www.redwheelweiser.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Bamford Seidelmann

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.

  Reviewers may quote brief passages.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright ownership and to obtain permission for reproduction for the quoted material in the book.

  ISBN: 978-1-57324-701-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

  Cover and interior design by Kathryn Sky-Peck

  Grateful acknowledgment to Jody MacDonald for permission to adapt elephant photography into front cover artwork (www.jodymacdonaldphotography.com)

  Printed in Canada

  MAR

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter

  For Mollie Catherine Ashworth

  Contents

  Author's Note

  Introduction

  PART ONE: ANGRY BEARS

  Chapter 1: Spirit of the Bear

  Chapter 2: Hitched and Launched

  Chapter 3: Realization and Refusal

  Chapter 4: Lightening the Load

  Chapter 5: The Unraveling Begins

  Chapter 6: Breathing Lessons

  Chapter 7: Sick Leave

  Chapter 8: Feeding the Bears

  Chapter 9: Needle in a Haystack

  Chapter 10: Radical Sabbatical

  Chapter 11: Slam-Dunk Diagnosis

  PART TWO: HEEDING THE CALL

  Chapter 12: Throwing Bones

  Chapter 13: Ecstatic Encounters

  Chapter 14: Doin’ the Mamba

  Chapter 15: Alice Arrives

  Chapter 16: Hugging Horses

  Chapter 17: The Healing Stones

  Chapter 18: Family Healing

  Chapter 19: Everything Is Alive

  Chapter 20: Soul Retrieval

  Chapter 21: Sunglasses and Brass Knuckles

  Chapter 22: Emergency Sabbatical

  Chapter 23: India Calling

  Chapter 24: Laid by the Universe

  Chapter 25: Saint Teresa

  Chapter 26: Into the Shadows

  Chapter 27: Hellbent on Honey

  PART THREE: INDIA

  Chapter 28: Agra

  Chapter 29: Mela-Mobile

  Chapter 30: Light Karmic Rinse

  Chapter 31: Troubled

  Chapter 32: Kumbh Mela Redux

  Chapter 33: The River

  Chapter 34: The Grove and the Jungle

  Chapter 35: Temples in the Rain

  PART FOUR: RETURN HOME

  Chapter 36: The Way Back

  Chapter 37: Mollie

  Chapter 38: Back to the River

  Chapter 39: Into the Woods—Then Home

  Acknowledgments

  Author's Note

  THIS MEMOIR accurately reflects my own experience. I have reconstructed the story from my memories, my journal entries, and from my conversations with the characters involved. All names and details are real except for several of the participants in my travels to India and in my residency training. As the friends in my brain trust are fond of saying: you cannot make this stuff up. I have occasionally compressed and shifted the chronology of some events for clarity.

  If you are in search of an excellent curriculum and ethical teachers to learn more about shamanism, I heartily encourage you to check out the Foundation for Shamanic Studies at shamanism.org. Originated, researched, and developed over nearly fifty years by anthropologist Michael Harner—the pioneer of contemporary shamanism—the Foundation's training can offer students like you the opportunity to learn and practice authentic, powerful, and effective shamanic healing methods. Their decades-long and broad-based effort continues to provide an immense contribution toward healing humankind and the Beasties and the Earth we all share.

  Introduction

  Safety is all well and good; I prefer freedom.

  E. B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan

  I was gently eased into chaos by a sneaking sensation that I was no longer doing the work I was meant to do. My career in medicine, that had formerly thrilled me, began to feel like a prison. As it turned out, the door to my metaphorical jail cell had always been ajar, waiting for me to leave it and explore. Instead of wandering out, I could have chosen to reupholster my office chair in an adorable European chintz with a pattern of dancing pugs—pugs, after all, are incredibly whimsical. Through my lifelong enthusiasm for interior design, I knew that changing a room could change your life. At some point, however, I realized that it would be dangerous for me to stay. Material shifts are useful; but only changes at the level of spirit endure.

  What my soul t
ruly craved was freedom.

  I was dying—at least, the externally driven, board-certified part of me was dying. I felt called to do something else. Precisely what that something else was, however, eluded me. I knew something was wrong, and I was filled with self-doubt.

  Eventually, I left medicine to pursue a radically different path. What did I do to arrive at that path? A better question might be, what didn't I do?

  I danced with sacred stones, meditated with mantras, faced my shadow, spent dozens of hours traveling to sacred realms via drumbeat to meet helpful spirits, tramped on trails while communicating with the wild, embraced a rescued mustang, lay on a tarp in the desert while being examined by twelve strangers, sold half of our possessions in a public sale, and had bones thrown for me by African shamans.

  All of these strange activities played an important part in the messy process of finding my connection to the Divine and learning to trust its guidance. Most people, my friend Suzi teases me, would never have taken these extreme measures. Others may not long to cavort with a gazillion Hindu pilgrims on the banks of the Ganges river, but my hope is that my story inspires you, dear reader, to find your own path to freedom.

  With hindsight, I recognize that my distress with others’ suffering was my call to the Hero's journey. Faced with the enormity of my discomfort, I refused at first. It took me years to understand how to change my answer from “no” to “yes.”

  If you decide to say “yes” to your own soul's calling, I've got one question for you:

  How good are you willing to let it get?

  PART ONE

  Angry Bears

  All doors are hard to unlock until you have the key.

  Robert C. O'Brien, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

  CHAPTER 1

  Spirit of the Bear

  “You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,” said the Lion.

  C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

  The persistent thrum of the drum urges me forward. In my mind's eye, I go to a canyon in Utah that is walled by soaring cliffs. The ground is dry and covered in low grasses and herbaceous plants. The soft morning air smells of pungent sage. I decide to travel down a gravel-floored tunnel from a cave I conjure up from memory. My bare feet connect with the cool stone tunnel floor. The walls are damp and covered with droplets of water as I feel along them with my hands on the way down, down, down.

  As I step out of the tunnel onto soft sand and enter the Lower World, I see a red-winged blackbird—the kind that has surrounded me in the marsh lately. Per-co-cheee! When I ask her silently if she is the animal who can help me, she indicates “no” with a slight head movement but invites me to follow her. She brings me to a bear. I feel her—her large claws and leathery pads. She allows me to place my hands over her broad, upturned paws, and I can sense her immense feminine strength. Then she wraps her arms around me.

  In her embrace, I ask this bear: “Why are you here? How are you here to help me?” She takes me into her cave and soothes me, rubs my back, and tells me: “All will be well on this new journey.” I feel loved by the divine kind of mother you can only conjure up in dreams, one who loves you for exactly who you are, no matter what. She turns and shows me an image of a huge rhinoceros (on a flip chart, strangely enough) and says: “You're in the process of becoming more like the rhino—thick-skinned and peaceful.”

  Strangely, I believe in this mother bear. I feel as if my experience with her, on some level, is more legitimate than any experience I've ever had in “real life.” As the drumming comes to a close, I return from my first visit to the Lower World feeling calmer and more peaceful. And I find that I also believe a bit more in myself.

  I recall a time, decades ago, when I was in college, and my dad and I camped in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. In the fall, the two of us backpacked on the Border Route trail. At night, we scarfed up the freeze-dried food we'd packed, famished after hauling our gear eight or nine miles along the hilly trails. After dinner, we strung our packs up high in the trees for safekeeping and built a fire for warmth against those cold autumn nights.

  That year, there had been some alarming and unusual bear attacks in the area and I remember wishing that we had brought a can of mace or something. How was I going to defend myself or my dad if a deranged bear attacked? One night, we saw what we called the “spirit of the bear”—a little glowing face in the embers of the campfire. It was subtle and flickered in and out. A nose, dark ears, and two glowering eyes.

  Dad chuckled and reminded me about the Virgin of Suyapa, the patroness of Honduras, a deity revered for her healing abilities, who had first revealed herself to only a few individuals. “Maybe when they first recognized the Suyapa, it was a bit like our little bear here in the campfire,” he said, smiling. The moment suddenly felt sacred, as if we had seen a vision.

  Until that moment, I had forgotten about Suyapa, a deity to whom, at thirteen, I had felt shyly drawn. While I was working on a medical mission with my dad in Honduras, I bought a tiny gold pendant in her image for myself with money I had saved up from babysitting. Despite years of attending an Episcopal church, Suyapa felt holy to me in a way that Jesus had yet to do.

  The campfire spirit wasn't the only bear that had appeared in my life, however. I suddenly remembered that I'd been known as “Sarah Bear” throughout high school, because, for a year, I had played the bear mascot for our sports teams. And while out jogging in my neighborhood just last year, I had come across a mother bear and two cubs. Were these merely coincidences? Was I simply making up this connection? Somehow it felt like more than that. A bear? Yes. In fact, she had been with me all along.

  My first visit to the Lower World brought my connection to Mother Bear back into my life. This place, recognized by many shamanic cultures as an earthly realm filled with loving and compassionate spirits, is typically accessed through a tunnel in the ground. In fact, there are three “worlds” recognized by shamans all over the earth. The Upper and Lower Worlds are places where you can seek loving and compassionate spirits. The spirits in the Upper World tend to be in human form, while those in the Lower World tend to be in animal form. The Middle World, which includes the earth, the sky, the sun, the moon, and the stars—essentially the Universe—holds a mixed bag of spirits, some of whom are suffering, not loving and compassionate. This is not a place you normally go to discover a spirit guide.

  The wise men and women known as shamans who purposely journey to communicate with the spirits truly fascinated me. These unique individuals can act as conduits for the spirits, allowing healing and the transmission of information to help themselves and their communities. They can speak with the leaping leopard, the mouse, the trees; they collaborate with each spirit. I found that I was hungry for the kind of knowledge these shamans seemed to possess and eager to bring their wisdom into my life. I was ready to set out on this path—ready to enter the unknown. How had my life brought me to this realization? Like all important journeys, it can only be understood backwards.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hitched and Launched

  Even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

  Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

  My first day at medical school, I pointed out Mark to my parents in our class photo book. He was six feet four inches tall—a good eight inches taller than I was—reserved and self-possessed, with large and kind blue eyes. I tried to make eye contact with him in the student lounge and in the hallway, but he was tough to reach. This wasn't going to be easy. I joined intramural soccer to stalk him, even though I'd never played the game in my life. At our first practice, I casually asked around—“Where's Seidelmann?”—and was told that he'd hurt his ankle playing volleyball and was out for the season.

  I quit soccer on the spot, found Mark in the
gym nearby, introduced myself, and helped him hobble to his car. He never really had a chance.

  Weeks later, we had an awkward, yet strangely satisfactory, exchange at a Halloween party—I was Peter Pan in green tights; Mark was a Kabuki warrior in a silk robe and white face paint. Invisible sparks flew as we slowly tossed a Nerf ball back and forth while speaking of innocuous things like our shared love of the British New Wave band Modern English. A few days later, he called and asked me out.

  He took me to a bar that was filled with tattooed bikers sporting bandanas and chains. We—a khaki- and Shetland sweater–sporting duo—definitely did not belong. The bikers soon returned to pounding their pitchers of beer, perhaps satisfied that we weren't missionaries. Mark's choice of venue startled me, because I'd heard from a friend that Mark's father was a Lutheran pastor. But I enjoyed being surprised like that. When I asked why he'd chosen a biker bar, he shrugged and offered: “The beer is cheap.”

  Five dates later—I almost gave up—we hadn't even kissed. On our sixth date, over a stir-fry Mark had expertly fixed in his apartment, we spoke of many serious things. Then he abruptly lunged at me. We began kissing and didn't stop, quickly falling from our chairs to the floor and rolling around until we eventually knocked the record player off the shelf. Later, he told me: “I had to do something! You wouldn't stop talking about Gorbachev and Gandhi.”

  There were a few hiccups during our courtship. Mark was really worried that, when he introduced me to his parents, my propensity for salty language would put them off. I wasn't known for my verbal restraint. All the way down to Minneapolis, he admonished me to avoid even the words “God” or “damn.” I restrained myself as best I could and somehow made it through the weekend. His parents were lovely. Eighteen months later, we were married.

  Newly married zeal prompted me to share with Mark my fantastic dream: Now we can go to India! After all, we were free—no kids or real jobs yet. I was only twenty-four. He was twenty-six. A chunk of time off between medical school and residency seemed a perfect opportunity to take the epic journey to India I'd always imagined. Think of it—the birthplace of Gandhi!