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Tibetan Shamanic Method of Working with Danish Suicide

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Uploaded by on Jul 25, 2010

I had planned a whole other journey into Copenhagen to participate in Ridley Scott's worldwide "Life in a Day" Youtube / Sundance project. But someone I'd been working with nearly succeeded in a serious suicide attempt, so the journey became something else entirely. Before ending up as a Tibetan shamanic ritual deep in a thorny thicket by Vestvolden - the long forested moat embracing greater Copenhagen - Allan Christensen, Danish theoretical cosmologist, happened to be on the wooded path with his electric bicycle and we engage in a long conversation about Higgs boson, CERN, the Big Bang, Climate Change, Carl Jung, awareness and Tibetan Buddhism. Allan describes Buddhism as an atheistic religion.

Then we journey deep into the underbrush, where nature is mercilessly exquisite and where a tiny warbler is offered into the flames. I asked the PTSD-stricken person to hold the camera as I engage the Buddhist ritual so that the person's mind would be occupied with something necessitating ground rather than the complex CNS impulses of fear, guilt and self-pity.

What had occurred the day prior, as this person was active in suicidal ideation that included an overdose and self-burial, was rather remarkable. A green willow warbler suddenly fell dead in front of the person, and then a few feet further a red Tibetan prayer flag drifted along the sidewalk. That shocked the person back to the here and now. Knowing that I also work a lot with animals, the person decided to call me and ask what ought to be done with the bird. I noticed an abnormally high level of conflicting emotions being masked in the voice over the telephone, so I suggested that the dead songbird be brought to me.

An hour after the final scene in this video, the person broke down and candidly revealed to me the entire nature of the fantasy to die. 15 years of Danish psychiatry, several long hospitalizations and intense pharmacopoeia had never succeeded in doing that.

It took the death of a tiny songbird for this to occur.

That is exactly what occurred in Copenhagen, Denmark on July 24, 2010. The simple practice of paying close attention to life is what makes this sort of journey real; it is nothing mysterious to me. But it does require practice in our world to disentangle the emotional signals of the brain from interfering with this natural ability.

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