The drummers are warming up with a few short riffs. A Latino guy is burning some dried sage so he can start smudging – purifying – people. A Black woman is setting an African cloth on the altar – a blue plastic tub from American Outlets from out on Third Avenue – and putting rocks, candles and other objects on it. Someone reaches across and hands her a lighter. Now a red-haired woman comes in and starts singing a song to the orisha Chango, the heart of thunder, and lifts the drummers to a faster pace. People round the room gravitate to her, move to her rhythm, and sing the song behind her lead. Then all of a sudden, a half bald white guy jumps up and screams some words in Gabonese:

“Nima decombo bucaye!”

Aye! shouts everybody else.

Anya! he calls again.

Ay! they all respond with a deafening roar.

The air is thick with sage smoke. Support group at the needle exchange has started.

 We Are The Medicine is the name of the group, but also it’s a manifesto, and it’s a truth we have nearly forgotten. This medicine doesn’t come out of a pharmacy, and you don’t have to call your health insurance company to see if you’re eligible for it. The medicine is our long-dormant healing capacity, hidden inside us, and it fits into today’s lifestyle about as well as the outcast people gathered here to do ceremony. As Malidoma Somé, a healer from Burkina Faso put it, the West is a “lobotomized culture,” where, if we want to create change, we must become “artisans of the sacred” and “engineer a prison break” from our stalled and faulty thinking. Most people in this room have seen the inside of a prison cell, so they could be the best ones to lead the way out.

 But I get ahead of myself. This began a few years back, when Dimitri Mugianis – the half bald screaming white guy – visited me after his initiation in Gabon. Dimitri’s mission in life was to help drug users get off drugs through the use of a weird and intense hallucinogenic drug called ibogaine. That’s what had taken him to Gabon, where his initiation ceremony into the bwiti spirituality involved eating massive amounts of iboga root, tripping his brains out, discovering the secrets of the universe, and madly puking for three days. This plant medicine though, is what entirely clears a person of chemical dependency on opiates. On his return to New York, Dimitri gave me a present from Africa. It was a beautiful ceremonial wooden rattle made of three round bulbs, representing the upper, the lower and the middle world. Each bulb was a large hollow nut shell, and if you carefully peered inside you could see bright red seeds inside that made the rattling sound. I thanked Dimtri sincerely, put it in my drawer and forgot about it.

 A couple of years later, and I was at the needle exchange I work at in East Harlem, running a support group. This group ran through many incarnations, but at that time I was doing meditation and one day for no special reason, I pulled out the rattle-of-three-worlds. The rhythmic sounds of this rattle brought people to interior spaces I didn’t know you could get to, and the rattle becomes a regular group feature. Then Dimitri’s movie I’m Dangerous With Love, came out. It describes his own detox from heroin, his work with drug users, and chronicles his journey to Gabon, and the initiation. At New York Harm Reduction Educators, we give special preference to movie stars, so I invited Dimitri to join us in the meditation group. It was a potent mix, this ex-dope fiend talking to his brothers and sister about oppression, the industrial prison complex, about the old ways many of our grandparents knew, about his African teacher Papa Andre, and the eccentric method he used to get off drugs. “Hey man,” suggested Dimitri one day, “instead of talking about rituals let’s do some of that stuff right here,” and that is where our medicine began to form. It got so interesting we even broke down and started to pay the guy.

 A few weeks later, one warm day, I was taking a break outside our office and as the cars rolled by on Lexington Avenue, I fell into talking with John Berry. I didn’t know it then, but John had helped start a theatre company, been a human rights activist, and cut sugar cane in Cuba. He lived in the office neighbourhood and picked up services from us every little once in a while. Most people get acclimatized to the world until they take its everyday wonders for granted, but John was never going to do that, and kept the miracle with him wherever he went. Half the time when he was talking, I didn’t quite follow – but I noticed this was always the more fun and poetic half of the time. In the warm fall sunshine John told me he belonged to a drum circle that had met for years in Marcus Garvey Park, and that he had a collection of African drums at home. John got interested in our group and offered to join, and with that our medicine was truly born. He brought a variety of drums to us, his playing was always right in the pocket, and he turned New York Harm Reduction’s group space into sacred space.

 Now the fluorescent lights are out, and the darkness is softened by the glow of the candles. The Latino guy, Robert, has the sage burning well, and he’s ready to smudge people – to purify them with smoke. A man stands in front of him with his arms spread out to his side, poised to receive the purification and moving slightly to the music. Robert carefully draws the burning sage in the air around the man’s body, cleaning the energy that emanates from him. Behind the man a woman is shaking a rattle, her hand placed lightly on his back. She and Robert concentrate their attention on the purifying power of the smoke, while the man stays receptive with his arms outstretched. A gentle pat tells him he is done and the next person comes up.

 Another guy is going round the room daubing a streak of white powder above the right eye of everyone who accepts it, while a woman has red powder that forms a dot over the third eye, and this also gets offered to everyone in the room. Dimitri explains that in the Gabonese tradition the white represents the male life force (as in semen) and the red, the female (as in menstrual blood). Now the smudging and daubing are done, and Robert is leading an improvised procession round the altar, displaying the sage and blessing the drums.

 Most of the people in this room are forty or older. They came of age in the 70s and 80s, when they were tossed out of Consumer American Dream like an empty juice container. Now they live in an urban version of an Indian reservation, hidden in very plain sight from mainstream culture, struggling with drugs, struggling with welfare, and one stop-and-frisk away from the prison system. If ours is a commodity culture, their commodity is their diagnosis, whether that’s a “substance abuse disorder” or a glitch in their “mental hygiene.” They have been assigned the high risk/no pay job of scapegoat in the social order, wearing the costume of junkies, crack-heads, whores, and scum of the earth, when in fact they are children of God, spirit in a body, stewards of the earth. Their main item of trade is problems that Medicaid will cover, and the problem with that is you can sometimes mistake their label for the contents of your character.

 In this lobotomized culture of ours, we cannot face our own shit too well, so we criminalize and pathologize the people on the margins, especially the ones who are closest to their indigenous roots. But it’s these very roots that can be the solution for us all. “I believe we all have been guided to be here,” says Maria Alice Campos Friere, who is one of the Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, a group of elders whose mission is to help save the planet from our destruction, “And we will be guided to do what we came here to do. We cannot say we are of this race or that one, we are all the same flame in life. I am thankful for this Holy Mother, our planet the Earth who received us all, for the destiny we have here to be this channel to eternal life in receiving the knowledge from our ancestors to give to future generations.” Nature has light and shadow, but no “dark side.”

 In our group we are trying to learn things that indigenous people never forgot: everything is made by the Creator and is sacred; from rocks to animals, plants and people, we are all related; our ancestors are alive in us, the earth is our mother, and our greatest strength lies in community. We also talk about the difference between cyclical time and linear time. Linear time has its beginning, middle and end, it seems to constantly be telling me I’m late for something, and the day I reach “the end of the line,” will be when I die. We’ve set things up to rely on our linear time, just like we need linear space. Without linear time to set me straight, how could I know I’m working my 9 till 5 (or was that 6 some nights?) and without linear space how would I go all those blocks to my job and sit in my cubicle, and ask people to fill out the boxes on my intake while I stare at the square tiles on my ceiling? Cyclical time on the other hand, is natural and rhythmic. Like breathing it has its pauses, its filling and its emptying, and in cyclical time there still is death, but it stands as winter does to spring and as morning does to night. “I’ll be back!” says every part of a cycle, and here I can get to wonder non-linear things like, what do our ancestors have in store for us?  

 Black Elk, a Lakota elder, said this about cycles, “The power of the world always works in circles and everything tries to be round. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons make a great circle in their changing, and always come back to where they were. The life of man is in a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our teepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant us to hatch our children.”

 It’s time for the invocations now. A noisier rattle than my rattle goes round the room with each person as they speak. “I want to thank my higher power for waking me up this morning,” says Jeff, “not everyone was given that today, and I’m grateful. I’m going through some stuff right now, and it hasn’t been easy. But I know I’ll get to the other side of it.” A woman describes how her son got locked up, and she asks for him to have the strength to get through the ordeal. Another woman describes how her boyfriend beat her so badly she needed five sets of reconstructive surgery, and she says how grateful she is to be alive here today and asks for strength to go on. Dimitri invokes the Creator, “the faceless one, the eternal one, the one with no name,” to “keep us from bad cops, bad dope and bad decisions.” A woman who is new to the group says, “It’s good to see black people gathered together where it’s not a funeral or the jailhouse. I want to say how thankful I am my husband is back from prison, and it’s so good to have him with me – we’re having our ups and downs, but we’ll get through it. The rattle goes round the room to each and every person there, and everyone says something, give some kind of praise or thanks, or greeting.

 Where I come from they don’t do invocations. The London I grew up in was a place of respectable houses, neat gardens, and no soul whatever. Long ago we tamed our portion of earth into submission, and our connection with the ancestors, despite our famed heritage, was mostly school-book stuff about who killed whom to be king. But if you want to have an organized kingdom where the soldiers march in straight lines and people are producing enough money for you to go out and conquer the neighbours, you have to tear your old indigenous culture up by its roots. If on top of that you want to start an industrial revolution, you have to get still more regimented and monetize the hell out of everything, from the crops in the fields to the coal under the ground. In England and all across Europe the old traditions based on the cycles of the land and the pagan-based festivals went from tolerated to outcast. The old maypoles were pulled down, festivials were banned, carnival and dancing were banned, and indigenous healing, labeled as witchcraft, was outlawed and destroyed. During the Witch Scares of the seventeenth century between 40,000 and 60,000 people – most of them women – were killed.

 The rulers may have looked at the peasantry as unruly and uncouth, but at least they were part of some larger “us,” and were needed to bring in the crops, serve the food, and later on work in the factories. But once the Europeans were able to build huge boats, fill them with guns and conquer the world, the people they met across the globe did not fare so well. They had the wrong skin color, the wrong language, the wrong religion, and very often the wrong sex life. Not only that, they danced in ceremonies that made far less sense to the conquerors than the antics of the peasants back home. But what was most deadly for the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, Australia and other places was that, because they were respectful to the earth and given to long ceremonies, they were not good at being monetized on their own land. The juggernaut of empire moved in with genocide and slavery, and it’s been estimated that 50 million people died in the holocaust of the European expansion between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Look at the Amazon rainforest and you’ll see that we are not finished, even today.

 When Empire came rolling through the lands of Chief Luther Standing Bear, in what’s currently known as South Dakota, saw the full dimension of the conquest: “We do not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth as wild. Only to the white man was nature a wilderness and only to him was the land infested with wild animals and savage people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it wild for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was for us that the Wild West began.”

 An Australian Aborigine elder put it this way: “Unless whiteman learns to enter the dreaming of the countryside, the plants, the animals before he uses or eats them, he will become sick and insane and destroy himself.” But here, in “civilization,” it’s the people in our group room, who are the ones who don’t fit in, and who our culture calls sick, insane and self-destructive. And we invite them to look outside themselves for the fix.

 The invocations are over, and the altar is moved to the side. We open the invitation for one person to come to the center of the room and receive a healing from the rest of today’s community. Marlena comes up and asks for help in dealing with her children. She sits gathering herself as people arrange a circle of stones and candles around her. Someone puts a glass bowl filled with water behind her, a plastic turtle is laid to her side, and a Hopi kachina doll – a spirit dancer – is placed before her. The drummers give a slow and steady beat as we gather round her. Dimitri invites everyone to connect with their breath, raise their spiritual power, and direct that positive energy towards Marlena. Several people stand with their palms stretched close to her and their eyes closed fiercely. A guy named Jimmy dashes out the room and comes back a minute later with a bunch of greenery, snatched from we know not what tree. He strokes the leaves over Marlena in a ritual fashion and says words over her quietly. Someone else is wishing that the pain that has been passed down to her from ancestor to ancestor be finally released to the sun, the sky, the ocean and the earth. The drums reach a climax, Marlena raises her open hands above her head, as she pulls in all the power we have sent to her. Then she smiles.

 Marlena released a lot of pain today, but the empire is still sprawling on through us, both inside and out. Being torn away from our indigenous roots and the profound connection to spirit and to community we once had, leave a hollow emptiness inside us, that does not go away with the passing days and centuries. It is a black hole of suffering that shows itself in every building we build, every car that comes off the assembly line, and it’s ticking away its linear time on all the watches on our arms. It’s a collective soul-loss, souring us at the place where the deepest authenticity should be taking its seat.

 This is a hole that you either heal up or fill up. You can’t just live with it. From the little games we play on the screens we carry, to workaholism, to shopaholism, to Internet addiction and to those famous “street” drugs, this hole is so profound it has to be filled with a single-minded compulsiveness – nothing less will work. And in our cleverness, our culture has turned even this compulsive numbing to good account by ramping up simple need and simple adornment into consumerism. And consumerism itself has ramped up into conspicuous consumption, which itself has been overtopped by competitive consumption. In our billions, we fill our individual empty places with toys and gadgets, while the earth bleeds its resources into our childish hands. 

 The Cree people up in Canada have a saying: “When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the water has been polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then you will discover you can’t eat money.” It’s pretty clear we are approaching the point where the biggest madcap binge in history must come to an end – either because we come to our senses or because we destroy ourselves. The world is big, but it’s not infinite. And it’s not the scapegoat drug users who are on the brink of this self-destruction, but the responsible, respectable, nice people who are only doing what they are told. And they are egged on, every step of the way by us, the consumers. It’s time we all take a tip from the ones the juggernaut has ploughed under, and listen to our outcasts. A visitor who came to our group and showed us his Native American dancing, pointed out that in the West we think that technology is synonymous with electricity. But the ancient technologies of healing run on many things: drums run on sound, ceremony runs on sense impressions, meditation runs on breathing and on consciousness itself.

 We Are The Medicine is a communal hole-fixing. We gather together to make the spiritual hole a little smaller and feel the way towards our common truth. Many of the people in this room grew up with traditional beliefs, or pieces of them, still intact in their family lines. For them the reconnecting is second nature, letting us for this one hour become healers, dancers, and singers, living outside the grid of normal meaning-making. In many of the old traditions the shaman was a specialist who called on spirits on behalf of others, but today we are discovering ourselves as healers, and the community as healer of all ourselves. The indigent, like the indigenous, hold the key to our redemption. I don’t just mean the individual people who are given those labels, I mean the indigent parts of everybody, the “lost children who cannot pray and cannot go away;” and the indigenous core below our thin skin of rationalism and materialism, who knew all along where home is, and is willing to take us there.

 Marlena thanks us, smiles again, and says she feels a burden lifted from her. We stay in our tight circle.

“Nima decombo bucaye!” shouts Dimtri.

“Aye!” we all respond.

“Wanya!” he shouts.

“Ay!”

Dimitri explains these words. In Gabon nima is the ancestors; decombo is the people, the community, and bucaye is the word for greeting to a man, and also the word for last sound our breath makes as we leave this world. Wanya is greeting word to women and the sound of the first breath, the cry of the baby. Aye – is in Gabon just as it is in bonny Scotland. So this phrase calls on the community of the past, the community of the present, on male and on female, on life and on death, to come together and be one in ritual. That is what we are saying to each other.

 The drummers now lighten up the mood with a faster beat, and Dimitri sees us out with a prayer and a shout, people gather, talk, the lights come and someone starts putting the rocks, candles and face paint back in the blue tub. Ceremony is over for today.

 About a year ago John our drummer, died. He was killed across the street from our office by a man who mistakenly thought John had taken some of his de-souled, lobotomized, brand-name stuff. Like any other Black American without wealth, John lived in a world where the cops, the penal system, the political system, and the reward system were stacked against him. Being intelligent and sensitive only made things harder, but John used his qualities to spiritually survive in a world designed to not work for him. I remember him sauntering down Lexington Avenue in a raggedy tee-shirt and a pair of old flip-flops where he looked like a vulnerable apostle, lost and strangely at home in the world around him.

 John’s funeral completely filled the Resurrection Church across town in West Harlem, and while the choir sang gospel hymns, John’s drum circle group in the undercroft below beat out a separate, throbbing rhythm in love with life and in love with the music upstairs. John, you are our group’s first ancestor, send us your rhythms and your blessings as Joshua, Louie and Carlos now follow your sonic leadership. How do we honour what you’ve done for us and fulfill the promise you created?

Our program can grow into an uptown wellness center, where people can get healed and  learn how to heal. Agencies all over the city can learn to replicate what we are doing. But I think that honouring John, the apostle in flip-flops, comes when we stop empire from juggernauting through our hearts and souls. This culture’s current version of healing – the mental health service – perfectly reflects the empire it comes from. It’s linear, it’s hierarchical (“me the doctor, you the patient, me the impatient doctor”), it puts thinking above all other functions, and after your intake you become a consumer “in the system,” with a health insurance number, a diagnostic code and all the other data points. If we really see a human being as a vast accumulation of data, then we’re screwed.

Let’s scratch our own surface and find the part of us that still responds to the rhythms of the earth, the part that loves to stop and stare at clouds or feel the sunshine, and thrills itself to breathe, feel happy, and sometimes be completely silly. We Are The Medicine says, don’t stay stuck in the think, think, think of the head. bring in the body – not just as a place to pop your pills into – but as a mover, a shaker, and a dancer for change; bring in spirit, and feel the sacred energies; bring in your own soul, your holy imagination, which works as the healer of that spiritual hole; bring in community, your own folk, and bring in your healing traditions, because the ancestors can heal us, and we can heal them, and right now there is a lot of karmic shit to be hauled away.

When we’ve done some of that spiritual garbage disposal, we will be able to get right some of the simple things we’ve gotten so wrong for so long and so often, like being kind to each other, and loving the earth we come from. Black Elk, that greatest of Americans, said at the end of his life: It may be that some small root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom, and be filled with singing birds. Hear me, not for myself, but for my people; I am old. Hear me that they may once more go back into the sacred hoop and find the good red road, the shielding tree.

Let’s find our road back into the sacred hoop. It’s a good place to be – and there are many people waiting to greet us.