A speaker (guest) recounts years studying with an Alaskan Native American teacher named White Eagle and describes a practice called "balancing of the shields." The practice posits four energy centers or "shields" around the navel—north (adult male/wise elder), south (young boy), west (adult wise woman), east (young girl)—and teaches that psychological imbalance results when one shield is "stuck." The speaker emphasizes that everyone contains male/female and child/adult parts and that wholeness requires accessing all parts; the east/young-girl shield is linked to a Native American idea of the warrior as spontaneous, curious, and vulnerable rather than machismo. The speaker adds a reflective argument about identity and embodiment, noting that the physical body continually renews (claiming ~50 billion cells die daily and that over years no part of the body remains the same), so selfhood should be taught as an enduring, indivisible individual beyond the changing body. The video ends with host Josh Trent's standard outro inviting viewers to more videos.
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There's obviously a whole lot of different things to discuss about where the education system's going with all this, But I would like to take, like, a slightly different approach. I think some of the things that are missing are some of the things that other cultures could offer us. Like, for example, take the Native American culture. I've studied a lot with a woman named White Eagle, Medicine Woman, who's a Native American teacher out in Alaska. I've been going there for multiple years, and one of the. One of the kinds of practices that I got certified in was called balancing of the shields. And in balancing of the shields, they recognize that each one of us has four, like, orbs or shields or energy centers around our navel. In the north, south, east, west, on our north, south axis, we have the biological gender that we're born with. In the north, we have for us an adult male, a wise elder, and in the south, we have our young boy. And then on the east, west axis, we have our opposite gender shield. So in the west, we have our adult wise woman, and in the east, we have our young girl. And then if any one of those shields are stuck, which many of us have, because when we're a boy, we get told don't cry or be a man, or don't get access with this, or we have an abusive parent, or we have a coach or somebody that literally comes in and, like, fix us in a shield, or we get stuck in one, we get stuck in a child shield, for example, and we can't access the other wise parts of ourselves. What they're really showing is that all of us inside have a male and a female and a young boy and a young girl inside of us. And we can only become whole, and we can only have that whole wheel be filled in when we access all. All parts of ourselves. And interestingly, the east direction for a man, where the young girl is, is the home of the warrior. So Native American tradition, the warrior is someone who's connected to the spontaneity, the curiosity and the vulnerability of a young girl while also being a masculine warrior. Instead of just being this, like, machismo guy, it's somebody who is true to who they are, has courage or comes from their core, doesn't live at the effect of anyone in any place at any time, and has spontaneity and joy and creativity like a young girl would. And so what I'm kind of intimating is that really all of us, I think, have to recognize that on some level, we all have all these parts inside of us. And that it's really to embrace all of it. Now, the second component of it, I think, is that we have in our culture this deep fixation on the physical body. And if you just think about the fact that what is your physical body, when you woke up this morning, well, you didn't get much sleep. But when you woke up, 50 billion cells died from the day before. And in a couple years, they keep shortening the time that the body turns over. It used to be seven years, now I've heard like four. But a few years from now, no part of your body today will actually be your body. Every single cell, every part of your skin, hair, everything will be different. But since you were born till the day you die, there's always been a Josh. And so we're identifying with the car or the vehicle that we're driving instead of the driver. We're so worried about the gender or the makeup of the outside of the car, the paint job, fixing dents, right. But we're not really understanding who is in the car. And I think that if we had that, if we taught that in schools, if we taught that in our family, that who we are are an indivisible, immortal individual that is beyond this body, that might help a lot with those problems.
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