Recapitulation

Before leaving Oaxaca I got together with Yves and Claudia, of Tierra Aventura, who brought us to meet the healers and curanderas during our class two years earlier. We caught up over a long dinner at La Biznaga. I told Yves and Claudia about my road trip, how it was more than just a summer vacation. How it brought me to places of old loves, forgotten memories, and long held longings. It wasn't planned to be that exactly, I just had longings and a window of time to attend to them, the rest had unfolded from there.

I told them about my dream of the meditation retreat, gliding along the river, riding on the city bus where I saw Juquila. I told them about meeting Juan Carlos, who told me that dreams that have a feeling that stays with you, that wake you up like a cuckoo clock, are visions. How it was following those visions that brought me back here and I was thankful that I listened. How there was no other choice but to listen. No choice possible, only fire inside.

"Recapitulation," Yves said. "It reminds me of a technique used by shaman called recapitulation, where they scan over all the memories and events of their lives and where there was energy lost, they call it back."

It's a way of making space, a way of clearing old energetic entanglements in order for life force to fully flow in. Carlos Casteneda wrote, "The premise of sorcerers is that in order to bring something in, there must be space to put it in. If you are filled to the brim with the items of everyday life, there's no space for anything new. That space must be built...the sorcerers of olden times believed that the recapitulation of your life made that space."

It struck a chord. Through recapitulation, memory becomes a picture rather than a pull. Shaman used the technique for purification, in order to remain whole rather than fragmented, allowing them to move with heightened awareness through the unknown.