“You want to know who’s a real medicine man? He’s the one who doesn’t say ‘I’m a medicine man.’ He doesn’t ask you to come to him. You’ve got to go and ask him. And you’ll find he’s always there among his own people.”
-Louis Farmer, ONONDAGA
The Medicine Man is a role model of what it is like to live in harmony and balance with the Creator. It takes a long time, a lot of sacrifice, and discipline to become a Medicine Man. A Medicine Man is humble and never crass about anything. He knows he lives to do the will of the Great Spirit. He knows he is to help the people. He lives very low key - the more low key he lives, the more people seek him out - and such is life. The more one serves the people and is quiet about it, the more he is sought out. The quieter he is, the more powerful his medicine.
Open-mindedness leads us to the very insights that have eluded us during our lives. When many of us arrive in the Fellowship, we fancy ourselves as reasonably open-minded people. For one thing, many of us tried lots of different experiences! More seriously, we may have an “anything goes” or “live and let live” type of attitude and have been tolerant toward others who aren’t like us. But were our minds even a tiny bit open to others’ insights and opinions or to feedback about our behavior? Could we even listen? Were we able to admit that we might be wrong or didn’t know something? Did we believe that we needed to change–and even if so, did we believe we actually could? Probably not so much.
Our experience tells us that open-mindedness is at the very foundation of change for us. While some members may insist that we have to “change everything about ourselves,” practicing open-mindedness does not mean that everything we know–or think we know–is worthless. Instead, we gain some carefully wrought insight into what behaviors and perspectives we want to keep in our lives and what is no longer serving us today–and we learn to share these insights with others.
Asking questions, listening to the answers, and then letting those answers resonate helps us to identify our old ideas and patterns, see our behavior more clearly, and act differently when it’s called for. We learn to listen more, rather than planning out what we want to say. In the process, hopefully, we grow more comfortable with the concept of “I don’t know.” Open-mindedness prevents us from running away from problems, ourselves, and each other. Many of us believe that striving to be open-minded keeps us closer to our Higher Power or to the higher self we want to be.
I aim to keep my mind and my heart open. I will listen more and speak less. And I will allow my insights and opinions to evolve as my well-being and spiritual journey does.
Together, we unify these principles of humility, open-heartedness, and spiritual awakening, learning from the quiet wisdom of the Medicine Man and the transformative power of open-mindedness within our Fellowship. They teach us that true strength lies in serving others quietly, listening deeply, and evolving continually.