Lee - The Circles of Life

A ROADMAP FOR LIFE

Copyright 2017

All rights reserved.

The Circles of Life is a traditional Native American teaching that gives insight into our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual abilities at any given time in our life. It is a reference book, to help gain awareness of how age causes certain areas of our life to be emphasized. For example, we generally are more emotional in our youth, more physically adept when we are in our prime, and as we enter our elder years, we have more wisdom than we have ever had before. These basic principles just scratch the surface of this ancient teaching. This lesson goes down into exponentially deeper levels, showing us what influences us at nine month intervals throughout our life up to the age of one hundred and eight, a sacred number in many cultures. Instead of simply seeing the season a forest is in, for example, we will be able to tell if it is early or late in the season and if there has been enough precipitation for healthy growth. Instead of simply seeing a picture of the Mona Lisa, we will be able to see the frame, her beautiful face, and every minute detail in the background. Instead of knowing we are traveling west in the United States on I-80 across Nebraska we will know exactly what mile marker we are near and where each business and house is along the way. Once we have this type of knowledge we can work with the influence our age provides.

As we go through life, it would be extremely helpful to know what lies ahead. Life brings us unexpected surprises every day. Some are good and some are bad, but a large number actually can be predicted by devoting a bit of careful thought to the situations at hand. Just as we know that winter will follow fall and spring will come after that, the patterns of our life are predictable. This is true for everyone, whether we are in the grips of destitute poverty in a third-world country or living the life of luxury in a palace. These are patterns that cannot be tampered with. Just as we cannot force summer to come before spring, we cannot escape these patterns and the effects they have on our lives.

Through centuries of study, traditional medicine men and women charted the patterns experienced by everyone as they went through life. There are no exceptions, men and women, the able-bodied and the disabled, are all influenced in the same manner. There are many books on childhood development but few people realize we do not stop growing and developing simply by virtue of having reached adulthood. We continue to learn, mature, develop and change until the day we die. In fact, some our most advanced growth takes place in our elder years. Change is the only constant in the universe.

Life is like a spiral. Our progression is similar to the shell of the nautilus. As we go around, progressing with each revolution, we revisit the same directions around the wheel over and over again. We may be in the East, but we are one level above where we were on our last time around, more advanced by one revolution, if we have learned from our last time in the East. It could also be compared to a spiral staircase. As we go through life, we further ascend in our evolutionary process. If we have learned our lesson, we will advance to the next stage when we re-visit that direction. If not, we will find ourselves confronted with a situation similar to the last time and a fresh opportunity to make a better choice.

There are four directions around most medicine wheels, though some have eight. All medicine wheels, such as the Wheel of Life and the Circle of Life, can be overlaid on one another. Every nine months we change our direction, our detailed focus on the Wheel of Life. Every three years we complete a revolution around of the Wheel of Life. I realize this can be quite confusing, but with the help of circles and wheels, I will make it easier to understand. This is the Basic Medicine Wheel.

The Wheel of Life is the key to the Circles of Life teaching. It shows the attributes of the eight directions. The Circles of Life are to be used as a map and the Wheel of Life is the key. It is laid on each circle in the Circle of Life teaching, although the Small Circles use the Basic Medicine Wheel, and the entire teaching as a whole, to understand the meanings of each direction.

Inside the Wheel of Life in the Circle of Life lesson there are four circles in each of the cardinal directions. The attributes of the four directions apply to these circles, so the Big Circle of the South is primarily about perspective, emotions, trust, innocence, and the arts. The Big Circle of the West is all about our physical body, and our physical world, intuition, imagination, and introspection. The Big Circle of the North is concerned with intent, knowledge, and wisdom while the Big Circle of the East is primarily about self-growth, enlightenment, and illumination.

We travel on these Big Circles throughout our life, starting in the South and going clockwise, but we also travel around eight Smaller Circles around the outside of these Big Circles. We start each of the Big Circles in a Smaller Circle that sits inside the very center of the larger one. This is a diagram looking closer at the Big South Circle. The numbers represent our ages in years and months.

The Circle of Life lesson tells us where we are on the Wheel of Life based on our age. If we are at an age that puts us in the East, then we are focusing on our personal growth, spirituality, and our enlightenment. We may be revisiting old spiritual issues that were not quite resolved or building on what we have already learned in the past. This is the direction where we will become more enlightened and experience more personal evolution at a faster pace than if we were focusing on our spirituality when our age puts us in the West, the place of the physical body, introspection, and intuition. We are able to grow and advance faster when we work in the area of our life that we are naturally facing. This is like saying it is easier to learn to swim when you have a pool and it is summertime or that it is easier to learn to ski in the winter when there is snow. Sure there are indoor pools and special equipment built to teach you how to ski inside and without snow, its just that it is easier to learn these things under natural conditions. We dont have to go through the expense and trouble of building and maintaining an indoor pool when we can swim in the lake in the summer for free. Similarly, it is easier to address and change certain aspects of our life when we in the direction on the Circle of Life that corresponds with that particular aspect.

For example, when we take age into account, it is easier to make large advancements in our physical world when we are on the Big West Circle. We are better suited for imagining and manifesting in the physical realm. This is when we are roughly between the ages of 27 and 54. Prior to this age, we are on the Big South Circle. There are smaller circles we travel around as we progress on the Big South Circle. Each of these smaller circles has a west and there is one small circle devoted to the west as well, so there will be many times we re-visit the west and the direction of the physical body, introspection, imagining, and intuition. As I mentioned before, life is a spiral, so we visit the west many times as we travel around smaller wheels on the Big South Circle before we are on the Big West Circle, but it is between the ages of 27 and 54 that we explore the physicality of our attitude and approach (the Southeast on the Wheel of Life), our trust and innocence (the South), our interpretation and how we make sense of things (the Southwest), and so on around the wheel. It may seem very confusing right now, but as we go through the directions and ages, it will start to become clearer as you see the patterns emerging.