The Sanctuary of Poros: A Journey to Spiritual Restoration

Hey, one more thing before you go. What can ancient Greece teach us about healing today? How do dreams, visions in sacred places restore the spirit?And what does it mean to cross between worlds, both literal and metaphorical, in search of sanctuary? We all want sanctuary.Stay tuned, because today we're exploring these timeless questions along with Dr. Edward Tick, and uncover how ancient wisdom can guide our modern lives and how you can benefit from exploring these ancient practices. I'm your host, Michael Herst. Welcome to One more thing before you go. In this episode, we're joined by Edward Tick.He's a world renowned transformational psychotherapist, PTSD expert, and author of Soul Medicine.His latest book, Passage to Poros in the Sanctuary of the Sea God, takes us on a journey to sacred island of Poros in a site of sanctuary, transformation and divine presence for more than 3,000 years. We're going to get into that. With over four decades of pilgrages and teachings, Dr.Tick has revived ancient practices like aesculapian dreams, which again, we'll talk about incubation, and explored how mystical traditions can offer tools for healing and serenity todayWelcome to Show Ed

Thank you very much, Michael. Honored to be with you.

What an amazing journey that your life has been on.

Yes, thank you. I own that with humility, gratitude, and fear and trembling.

I think that all of that mixture makes you the person you are today, and that's a brilliant person, who you are today. I always like to start at the beginning. Where'd you grow up?

I was born in the Bronx, New York City, and I was born in the inner city of the Bronx to a very poor family. But it was just Post World War II, so everybody was poor and struggling together. And so though it was an afflicted community, it felt like a village.And I haven't, uh. I lived in the Bronx until I was six, when my family moved to Queens, so New York City. So I. My entire childhood was in New York City.I want to share that. I haven't felt that sense of living in a. In a vital, connected, committed, devoted village in the United States.I haven't had that since my time in the Bronx when everybody was poor and struggling together and everybody was sharing well the history we had all had inherited from the World War II era.And so one of the many reasons I travel abroad and the places I go, especially Greece and Vietnam, is to go where community is intact, where villages like the one I write about on Poros has been intact for 3,000 years.And I immerse myself and my travelers in what a living village feels like, what presently many spiritual and religious organizations are fond of saying we need to build a beloved community. That's really true. We really lack it in our culture. And it does exist and intact in other ways, other places around the globe.So I was born in the Bronx. It was a troubled but beloved community. And it planted in me the love for village life, for communal experience, for everybody. Being in the.The mitt, in the mesh, in the stew, together, struggling side by side and helping and serving each other as well as themselves.

That's a brilliant opportunity for us to reflect upon how we as a community, society and culture need to come together. We're all human beings, we're all in this together. And I think we all need to be a little closer than. Than we. Than we haven't been.I grew up a very poor within myself. I grew up with a single mother. And obviously in this, you didn't have a checking account till what, 1974, 75.And, you know, trying to provide a home, trying to provide food, trying to provide a, you know, a good job, which back then was limited. So I can, I understand portions of that. I also.It's interesting that you bring up what you had brought up with the community that you find in other areas. Um, I follow the blue zone theory where that's exactly what they do.The community takes care of each other and the community looks out for each other and they, they keep an eye on each other and they feed each other and they. And I love that aspect of it.So I think, yes, what you're presenting is a reminder that we all should probably look and strive to become that way again.

We must. It's necessary.Before we got on for our audience today, you and I shared a bit about your history as a police officer and my history of working with veterans with post traumatic stress disorder and moral injury. We can leap right into that discussion, at least in this way that I have a very, very simple three word recipe for healing.Healing takes spirituality in community, spirituality in community.We know how much our veterans and our first responders suffer from not being given adequate principles and practices, philosophy and support for returning home. What we don't realize is the degree of trauma that results from the inadequate, the poor, the neglectful.Homecoming people aren't coming home to villages.They're not coming home to communities that stop everything, welcome them home, and give our warriors or responders everything they need and deserve for healing and homecoming.So I work with traditional cultures, Native American cultures on our continent and other traditional cultures around the world that do the warrior return portion of that life's journey very, very differently and with utmost support and attention. So not just feeding and caring for the warriors, but taking care of them fully for as long as they need until they recover.But more importantly, paying attention to the spiritual work they need to do and taking the war out of them and putting spirit back in.So of many, many examples we could discuss, I'll just share that the term for what we call post traumatic stress disorder among the Lakota people, the Sioux was, in their language, Naginapayapi, which means the spirits left. The spirits left. They didn't have complicated psychiatric diagnoses like we do, and putting the pathology on the individual survivor.Instead, they said, because of what this person has been exposed to, the extreme dimensions of violence and the killer, kill, be killed situation, that drains the spirit out of everybody, anybody who is in it. And spirit is drained off and needs to be restored.So we can understand PTSD as a disease of adaptation to a mainstream culture that doesn't understand warriors, that doesn't get their experience, that doesn't give them everything they need for a return journey to effectively take the war out and restore spirit and restore community belonging. So, yes, community is critical, and spirituality is critical for all of us.

I have to thank you from a personal perspective, because what you said is at 100% what happens in today's society, at least here in America. And it is. You touch my heart with that statement immensely.Because we leave the job, whether it's a soldier, whether it's a police officer, a firefighter, a paramedic, people who have put their lives on the line, people of service and community. People have a passion for it. You know, it wasn't just given the job as a police officer. I worked for the job. It became me.I am a. I am still a police officer deep down inside. I am still a sergeant. I still feel that deep down in me. I can't let that go. Yes.What an amazing description and analogy that you presented for us to have a better understanding of what warriors go through from all aspects.And I sincerely am grateful for you presenting that in such a way that it's easier for the community to understand because sometimes we feel set aside, we feel put away.We feel that we don't belong any longer because we were taken out of the environment, that we did belong into the family that we did belong with, and we're put back into a society that doesn't look at us that way any longer, and it can devastate us all it does.

It does. Regarding this, since we are stuck with the acronym PTSD now, everybody says that, everybody talks about it.Go to a coffee shop and you hear people at the next table talking about my ptsd. My ptsd. Well, there's several things going on. One is it's been popularized and made much more shallow than the wound really is.It is really a deep, devastating wound that causes, that wrecks lives, that crushes our spirit. So that one matter is we shouldn't be treating it in a casual way.And me surviving a fender bender is not the same as you confronting terrorists on the streets. And people should not equate that. So we need to have much, much more respect for real trauma and how life transforming it is. That's one matter.A second matter is, thank you for putting up the book. My books that are relevant to the Greek experience, and you did also for our audience.I have books that are profoundly relevant and have been breakthrough books for understanding the military and the veteran and the first responder experience. So those books are called War and the Soul and Warriors Return.And in both of those books, I describe how since we're stuck with this acronym, first of all, we know of more than 80 names this condition has been given since ancient times. Oh, it's not new and it's not a modern diagnosis.We made it a psychological diagnosis, and there's danger in that because we're pathologizing it rather than realizing anybody who's gone through such violent experiences are going to have soul wounds. So we need to not pathologize it, and we need to elevate it to the honorific and noble level that you and everybody who serve deserves.So I call PTSD Post Traumatic Soul Distress. It's not just our bodies. It's not just the central nervous system.Our symptoms are the ways our souls scream for attention and try to express themselves when we don't have the words, when we don't know what's really bothering us. Thus, the book the Body Keeps the Score has become famous in recent years.It's good and it's helpful, but it doesn't go to this level of how is the body? How is the soul speaking through the body? What are the symptoms trying to say?Rather than control them and crush them, help people just function in a normative way. Get back to your 9 to 5 job and lifestyle. No, that doesn't work.

Ed, as a world renowned transformational psychotherapist, especially with your PTSD expertise, how did you discover the healing practices and mystical traditions that made the island Of Poros a sanctuary for like 3,000 years. That's a lot of time.

It is, yes. Well, thank you. I'm going to go back to the Bronx and start the story. Please let me not talk too long about all this, because our time.But seriously, I began discovering or being led to what we would call mystical or transpersonal and non normative experiences way back when I was born and I was a young child in the Bronx.So when I was 4 years old in our tiny Bronx tenement apartment, I was awakened in the middle of the night because I knew something or somebody was in my room. And I looked around. I know it was four because my baby brother was sleeping in the crib next to me. I vividly remember the.The night, the room, everything about it. Uh, so I woke up in the middle of the night and I. And something was in my room.I looked around and I saw what looked like a psychedelic colored bejeweled butterfly flying all around my room in the dark. It was huge and it was beautiful. And I called my parents telling me there's a butterfly in the room. My father, they came running in.My father just grunted and went back to bed. My mother told me, you cry and go back to bed. I'm having nightmares. Okay? It wasn't a nightmare. It was. I was four years old and I had a vision.I didn't know what it was. I didn't know what a vision was.I didn't have the language that you and I are sharing today, but I knew I had seen something that was more real than real. Super real.And my parents taught me, be really careful who you talk to about this because most people aren't going to understand it or they're going to say it's not true. So I kept that vision to myself until I became an adult.I learned as an adult in my adult studies that the word for butterfly in ancient Greek is psyche, the same word used in psychology, but it doesn't mean mind. We've been taught that psychology is the study of the mind. Ain't what it means in Greek. It's psyche, logos.Psyche is the soul and logos is the order and meaning. So when we're looking at psychology, we're studying the order and meaning of the soul, not just the study of the mind.And since I was 4 years old, something in me knew that and wanted to follow the soul path, right? Jumping forward to that from that. When I was two years later, my grandmother died. So I was just six. She died within a couple of weeks of my birthday.And I had, after her death what Jung would call. Carl Jung would call a big dream. A big dream is not the everyday, ordinary dream about what's going on in our daily lives or just.Or in our unconscious.A big dream is something that seems transpersonal or supernatural and mystical, that connects us to the universe in a profound way and is life changing. Just after my grandmother died, I had a dream where my family and I were sitting outside our apartment building. We lived on the fifth floor.I told my mother somebody was ringing our doorbell. She said, that's impossible. We're on the ground. We're in the sidewalk. You can't hear it from here. I say, yes, somebody's there.I ran around to the front of the apartment building. I looked up five stories, and I saw my grandmother's spirit flying out the window, saying goodbye to everyone. And she was young. She was renewed.She looked like she might have looked when she first came as a Eastern European refugee decades before. There, too, a dream was sent me where I saw my grandmother's soul leaving. And my family and everybody around me said, it's impossible.This doesn't happen. You're nuts. So those two experiences taught me there is a spiritual world. There is an invisible world.We can access it through dreams and visions and unusual synchronistic events, as my book Soul Medicine concentrates on. What are those events? How can we facilitate them? How are they guiding our souls?But I learned that early that the invisible is real and we have access to it. And it will come visit us sometimes, even when we're not looking for it, but when we need it. And so I've been following that my whole life, really.And because of that, I. I've never fit in or even wanted to fit into a conventional job, conventional way of life. Many people have said to me, oh, why don't you just be a professor? You'll get tenure, you'll get sabbaticals, you'll get a pension. It's much easier.And you're a good teacher. You know, all this stuff. I don't want to do that. I want to stay out here with you, Michael, and with people. How?And the way we're living our lives and. And help restore meaning, spirituality, a mythic sensibility to our everyday lives. So all that said, how did I get to the island of Povs?This is part from childhood also. When I was 10 years old, New York City. When we turned 10, we could get our. Our adult library card.So right after school on my 10th birthday, I galloped to the library. I got My card. I was in the adult stacks, which were floor to ceiling, and I had no idea what book am I going to take home?My first adult book, what is it going to be? And I swear this is also an event. I didn't do it.Something or someone or some power pushed a book off a higher shelf over my head and it fell into my hands and scous honor. It was Homer's Iliad. The Iliad, the story of the Trojan War.And I said, I don't know who you are or what you're about or how you fell into my arms, but we're going home together. So at 10 years old, I read the Iliad and I fell in love with it.And so I was introduced to the Greek tradition, Vacyon, and not through any blood ties or relations, but through books, through the imagination. And so I've been studying it and following it my whole life, ever since.

And what an opportunity. Obviously, that was presented to you, if with a. With a what a story, Tall stack of books and. Yeah, or shelving of books and what do you get?You get that one.

I get that one.

That's profound. I think the universe was talking to you, really.

And we can say about any of these mystical events that we experience or others do we can. We always say, well, what are the chances?And my wife is very logical and grounded and she'll say, well, there might be one in a billion chances that that just happened because of a stray wind in the room. We don't know.She says that, and I say, yes, that's possible, and I'll allow for that a possibility, but is much, much more likely than something else we don't understand caused this event.And the more important thing is it was life guidance for me, and I accepted it, I embraced it and I followed it, and it helped set me on my life's path.

You know, we don't always get that opportunity to be presented to us like that.I think that what a profound, again, the universe talking to you from whatever modality it presented itself and you took it and ran with it, which is brilliant. I mean, we don't all get that opportunity to do that. I felt that way when I was a cop, when I became a cop.It really put me on the path I felt that was supposed to be on. And obviously I redefined my purpose along the way. But it, you know, it was.It was presented to me and as an opportunity, not in the same way as yours, but it's like, yeah, this is what I want to do. And I pursued It. And I was. I was grateful for it. I'll be grateful for it. Even getting injured and having to retire.I hesitate on there, but getting injured and having to retire. It presented new opportunity for me. And it took me a while to understand it and to realize it.But I wish I would have had a little angel up there push the book out a little sooner. But that's fantastic. What prompted you to write Passage to Poros? Tell me about Porosity.

Let me tell you about Portos. And actually, books got me to Poros.

Also.

Connect that story too. I found a book of poetry in a used bookstore in Massachusetts on the Cape, when I was on vacation with the family. It was the poems of George Seferis.That's S E F E R I S. He's hardly known in this country, but he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1963. First Greek who did. Well, I fell in love with his poetry, really in love. It was perfect poetry for me at that life stage.Wandering in exile, lost, lonely, trying to find where his soul really fits. Okay, so. And I was into my mid-30s and I was certainly feeling that I began translating some of Satiris's poetry. So I read his biographies.He studied all of his writings. And I only learned about the little island of Poros from him because it was his sanctuary during the Greek Civil War.He retreated from the war after surviving World War II. And he lived on Poros for two years during the Greek Civil War. And he wrote some of his most important work there.I wanted to go to the island where he had composed the work I was trying to translate and really experience the environment that he was in. Drench myself in the beauty, the spirituality, the ancient stories that he was writing about. So it was a dead poet and his poetry.Well, that got me on the Greek journey. That's Homer and then a dead modern poet and his poetry, George Sas. That got me to the island of Poros. Well, that was in 1987.And I have had such extraordinary experiences and opportunities. Life experiences on Poros that have been life changing for me. Profoundly so.And beginning in 1995, I was experienced enough with Greece and the Greek tradition that I began leading pilgrimages to Greece and included Poros in the pilgrimages because of some of the breakthrough experiences that I had there. And because of, as we were saying earlier, what an intact, loving village and community it is. And it has been for millennia.And so I keep going back and I bring travelers there. And it's a healing island. My. I had my granddaughters There. My five year old granddaughter says it's a magic island. She's labeled it the magic island.And now people on Toros call it their magic island too. Artists and writers have been retreating there for hundreds of years and discovering it. So I'm not the only one.I'm just, as some of my friends say, they're. Eddie, you're just the most recent American writer who came to Poros and fell in love with it and wants to tell our story.So now it's your turn to be part of the story. Tell the story and carry it through, carry it forward.So I even feel so much gratitude and belonging to that island that I also felt a sacred charge that I know this island, I know it intimately. And the people on the island have said to me, well, tell our story, help preserve and protect it as a sacred sanctuary. And so I do.

Well, I find it interesting in a passage to Porus, you discussed the Greek tradition of sanctuary and this whole aspect of sanctuary. How old is this tradition and how is it practice? You said you take people there, you, you bring people with you and you help them understand.Did they have that? I get like, this is a multi level question. Do they have the introduction to sanctuary before they get there or do.Are they introduced to it once they get there?

Oh, I, I always spend a lot of time with my travelers, preparing them before we travel.So in many ways, okay, of course there's reading and I ask people to read my books and also to read the key books that we will be studying and using as we travel. Beyond that. This is really important. I encourage what we would call mythic identification. Well, why are you taking this journey?What are the deepest soul questions you have at this life stage?Think about your own life history, your story, and what gods and goddesses, what mythological figures, what stories from mythology or from the tragedies do you see in your own story? Because we're all living mythic lives, only we tend not to be aware of it. We tend to.In our kind of society, we think of our lives in everyday secular terms. But in fact, you know, as was shared for you, buddy Michael, you are a warrior. You're living a warrior's journey.As you said about being a police officer, you are forever. One of the big mistakes our, our society makes is to think that we can turn our warriors and first responders back into civilians.The marines say once a warrior or once a marine, always a warrior. That's true for our military people and our spurt first responders. Also our identities have been so Transformed our reactions, our responses.Our value system has been so transformed. We're warriors for life. We need to embrace that.Greece and other cultures, Native American cultures, had the warrior path through the entire life cycle, not just while one is in service. And then you go back to being a civilian. It doesn't, and it can't work that way.You have found meaning, meaningful service after the police force that is continuing to help you, help all of us and protect all of us by bringing wisdom to us. That is incredibly important, preservative and protective work.And those are the essential warrior values to preserve and protect, not to harm and destroy. And so in the Greek work, I bring lots of warriors, veterans and first responders to Greece.Not exclusively, but sometimes I've only done warrior journeys to Greece. And we use the Greek warrior tradition, war. We go to the warrior sites, we go to Marathon, to Thermopylae. We study the history.We study, most importantly, the warrior archetype. And what does it mean in the Greek tradition? We can remember, Our audience probably knows they had two deities of war.One was Aries, the God of war, and one was Athena, the goddess of war. Well, in our American tradition, we teach people to be servants of Aries, how to kill, how to kill.And some people even want the experience of killing. Some people even like it. That's not being a warrior.That's what Jungian and death therapists would call being the shadow warrior trapped in the shadow. Ares was the God. Homer called him the God who delights in slaughter. He just wants to be in the fight. Athena was a protector goddess.She preserved and protected. She used diplomacy and persuasion. She did everything she could to not have to fight.And she only fought when it was absolutely necessary, when it was truly the last resort. And there was all that we had to preserve and protect the people.So one Iraq veteran that I worked with who went to Iraq originally gung ho for the war, he came back saying, I'm a pacifist now, and I will be a pacifist forever until someone tries to break into my house and harm my wife and my children. Then I'll be a warrior again. And that's right. He's aligned. I know how to be a warrior.I can be a warrior, but I will only exclusively use it for preservation and protection of the most important people and values in my life.That's just a mini version of helping veterans transition from ptsd, which means they're still in the Aries archetype to the Athena archetype to be a servant of civilization. Preserving and protecting the best of it. I lead.In addition to the journeys I lead to Greece, I've led 19 healing and reconciliation journeys to Vietnam. And this is relevant there also in profound ways. Vietnam. Vietnam is a communal culture, and. And it is intact.And believe it or not, it's still happy and healthy, even since the American War and the French war and the Chinese occupation from 1400 years. And there's almost no wartime PTSD in Vietnam. They don't have it.We would expect it to be epidemic there because of the amount of death and destruction, but it's not. They're loving, they're forgiving. They welcome Americans. They say, we know how much you suffer. We're sorry you can't heal at home.We're glad you came to Vietnam so we can help heal you with our love and our respect. They get the welcome in Vietnam that our veterans deserved here.

Yeah, that's brilliant.

Yeah. And we meet with former foes, and everybody enters into an identity of brotherhood and sisterhood because we survived the same trauma together.So our vets will say, how can you be welcoming to me?And a Viet Cong veteran will say, well, we're brothers and sisters because we survived the same hell, and we need to be telling the world the same story.

That's amazing. That's profound. Like you said, it's profound. Absolutely profound. You know, it's interesting because we watch kind of a weird connection.We watched this show called Somebody Feed Phil, and it's on Netflix. It's a great program. He goes all over the world. He not only talks about food, but he talks about culture as well.And he did a segment on Vietnam, and when he did, he said he was astounded. And he showed it within the program, that particular episode of that community that was there.He thought that because he was American, that he was going to be shunned then it might be difficult. And he said. And you saw it. Everybody welcomed him.He said he saw no remnant of war, no indication of the Vietnam War, no animosities towards them or the crew or anybody else. He acknowledged that and said that it was amazing that.That it was just a very loving community oriented by validating what you're saying in regard to that part. It was. I was able to see it from his eyes. It was pretty. Actually pretty amazing. And I did not go to the Vietnam War as well, but I have my.I have high school friends that did, and some returned, some did not. I had two uncles that were there. They both came back with PTSD from. From Vietnam.One uncle Worked a naval ship that picked up the survivors and the bodies and had to nurture them and take care of them until they got brought back home sort of thing. So obviously there were many, many things that they had to go through.My other uncle was a nurse in the military as well in Vietnam, and he had to go through what he had to go through with tending to everybody that was wounded and 18, 19 year old, 20 year olds that lost limbs and died and everything. He never had the. Neither one of them ever had the inclination to ever go back to Vietnam until a few years before my uncle, he died of cancer.Both of them died of cancer actually. But Uncle Nick went back to Vietnam afterwards, before he died, and he said it was a changed place.He said he couldn't believe the beauty was back, the community, the humanity was back, the compassion was back. So just to kind of step on what, you know, a little bit on what you said to say, I watched it myself through their eyes.

Yes. Thank you for the confirmation.I won't say more than that about now because of our limited time, but I've been there 19 times, so I've spent, I don't know, a year and a half or two years in country and yeah, and I've taken so 19, I don't know, between 10 and 20 people on a journey. I've taken several hundred veterans. At least half of them are, are, are vets.I just want to invite our audience today to imagine the reception that, the impact of a reception like that to any war survivor from any conflict. Imagine the people you fought against welcoming you with love, with forgiveness, with acceptance, with honor, looking at you as an honorable warrior.But you're in my country and you are killing my people. No, I see an honorable warrior who did what, what warriors are asked to do for their country.And you're not responsible for being used in the wrong way. You're responsible for being a good warrior. And you were.And we, your friends, now your former foes, see and honor you when our, you know, you've experienced it. But our veterans and first responders don't get that reflection from the Americans that you served.

No. Or do you take lessons?

Anybody who might have been on the other side, but to get that from the other side is miraculous and life changing. And if a former enemy can look at me with love, honor, respect, compassion, well, then maybe I can look at, learn to look at myself that way.

We as humanity need to take lessons from that, lessons from that, and even the Greek side from what you have presented. But back on Track Just a little bit.

Yes.

In the book you invoke the hymn to Poseidon by Homer around 800 or so BCE. Can you explain the importance of Poros in the ancient times as a sanctuary of Poseidon?

Oh, yes, thank you for that question. People know about the Acropolis in Athens, in the Parthenon, which was the main sanctuary for Athena.People also know about Delphi, Delphi, the sanctuary of Apollo, where people traveled to receive life's life guiding oracles. And if they got there once in their life, that was a miraculous experience and they got a message from the divine for how to guide their lives.What people don't know, and it's not even in the guidebooks, is that Poros was just that large and extensive and important a sanctuary. In ancient times it was the main sanctuary of the God of the sea, Poseidon. In archaic and classical times.It existed from at least 800 BC for several, well, until the classical tradition was destroyed. So it existed for about 800 years as the principal sanctuary of the God of the sea.We have to realize how important the sea was in the ancient world, the Mediterranean World Sea was the highway for everybody. That's how goods were trade, that's how people traveled, that's how armies traveled. That's how travelers went from one place to another.The sea was the lifeblood and the highway and the source of life and spirituality itself. And Poseidon is a very, very old God. There's some belief that he was the king of the gods before Zeus and earlier in the Bronze era.And he was a life giving God as well as. Most of the stories we've inherited about Poseidon are that he was a fierce, angry God of the sea who sent storms and earthquakes and was raging.Well, those stories are in Homer, in the Iliad, but those are only a few of the stories. He also brought water. He also brought fertility. His name, Poseidon comes from much, much more archaic language form.It comes from Posida which meant da was the name of Gaia Ga, the earth mother goddess. And posi meant the consort or the husband of. So Poseidon originally was the consort of the earth mother and he's the source of fertility.The sea is all earth came from. All life came from the sea. The sea is the womb of life.And Poseidon was the male fertilizing principle where that brought all that life into existence. As things evolved, he became, as the hymn says, he became the savior of ships.He didn't only cause storms that wrecked them, he also saved sailors who were, who were marooned or who were caught in storms. I know stories of modern Greek fishermen who were saved by miracles at sea. See by the spiritual archetype that would have been called Poseidon.Poseidon became St. Nicholas to the Orthodox Church. St. Nicholas is the protector of sailors and he's still prayed to. And all ships in Greece have an icon, a small chapel to St. Nicholas.Well, Poseidon, the God of the sea, became St. Nicholas the saint and the spiritual guardian of sailors. So it's the same archetype, but in a later iteration of culture.But seriously, I know people who were in serious storms and sea hazards, who had given themselves up as lost and perhaps drowned, and who prayed to St Nicholas or to Poseidon and had miraculous healing and rescue experiences. So people still believe in the archetype. There is a na. There's a naval training academy on the island of Portos.They have a Church of St Nicholas at the academy, but they don't teach their recruits that they're on becoming officers, chief petty officers on the island of Poseidon, the God of the sea.So I've sometimes had the experience of meeting with the recruits and teaching them about Poseidon and that you're becoming an officer in the Greek navy on Poseidon's island.You are continuous with a history that is thousands and thousands of years old and you are taking your honorable place in the next generation of that history. And boy, they love learning that they go up to the sanctuary in a new way.Oh, we thought it was just a cool place to have a picnic and see these beautiful views of islands in the distance.Oh, now we know we're in Poseidon's principal sanctuary and we should take vows here and be as connected from our soul as we can be and pledge our allegiance to the powers of the sea that we're going to be serving for our entire careers.

That's brilliant. That's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. How does.I touched on this earlier and I put it in my notes and I may mispronounce this, so forgive me if I do. Asclepian dream incubation. How does that incorporate within, or does it incorporate within the sanctuary arena of porosity?

It does, and thank you for referencing that. I will backtrack a little bit as well.Again, back in 1987 and that life changing trip I mentioned in my first trip to Portos, I actually went on that trip because by that time I had been working with Vietnam veterans as a psychotherapist for about a decade. And I realized that the wounds of war are far too deep, far too cutting Far too crushing to our soul to be healed by just ordinary psychotherapy.And so I went to Greece on a journey, my own pilgrimage, to study the ancient Greek warrior tradition. Not only to translate Sefera's poetry. As I said, that was one reason.The other reason was I was studying the ancient Greek warrior tradition, and I wanted to learn how, since there was so much warfare in ancient Greece, how did they heal their warriors, how did their warriors come home and successfully adapt and become very productive and contributing citizens? So, as it turns out, there's another sanctuary called. Well, it's spelled Epidaurus in English. It looks like Epidaurus. It's pronounced a P. Divorce.And that was the principal healing sanctuary of ancient Greece. And it was Asclepius, the God of healing, who was the primary deity at that sanctuary.I happened to arrive the opening night of the summer theater festival. The play in performance was Euripides Play the Trojan Women. That play may be the greatest anti war play ever written, and I highly recommend it.It's on Netflix with Katharine Hepburn starring as the Queen of Troy. I recommend it to everybody, but put your seatbelt on and have lots of tissues.Glen Syd really demonstrates all of the horrific pain and suffering that comes from war to everybody, the women, the children, the widows, the city itself, the surviving warriors. It's really, really intensive. Well, I saw it in this healing sanctuary in 1987, and that changed my life also.I went into that sanctuary thinking I'm here to learn what I can as a therapist for Vietnam veterans. I learned that night with a very intense, cathartic response to the play.Lots of tears of my own, lots of recognition of the world of pain that I was in, that I was saying, yes, I am willing to be in this world of pain with our veterans and walk through it with everything it takes. And what I learned is I'm not just a therapist for Vietnam veterans.I've been called to, to a lifelong mission, destiny, as a healer of the invisible wounds of war, that all wars of all times and places are the same. War is an archetype. It's a recurring historical, spiritual images, cultural value, pattern that recurs again and again and again throughout history.The times and the places and the uniforms and the historical reasons are different. But in its core, all of the archetypal dimensions of war and warfare and being warriors are the same and are universal.And I left that theater performance realizing this is what I was called to do, this is what I want to study, this is what I'm going to learn to practice and I can use these practices. So then I asked, well, why did I see this as a healing sanctuary? And who was Asclepius anyway? Why was the theater at his sanctuary?It turns out that I was in and I didn't know until I got there and was initiated. Asclepius was the God of healing.And his practices in ancient times were the origin of, of psychology and medicine in the, in the western world, from ancient Greece. Escapius. The records we have go back to at least 1400 BCE. So we have records that are 3500 years old and this sanctuary and many others.There were over 300 such sanctuaries around the Mediterranean world. They were the most complete, perfect holistic healing sanctuaries.They put to shame the holistic sanctuaries we have today because they had everything.They had acupuncture, acupressure and massage and nutrition and gymnastics and drama and the tragedies and psychotherapy and dream interpretation and on and on and on. They were a completely holistic sanctuary. Everybody was welcome. Perfect sliding scale.You didn't pay anything to go in there, and you only gave gifts of what you could afford when you left. So slaves could go and they could give an apple for their healing. Emperors would go and they would give a whole new building.The key of healing was not in the holistic practices. The key was in what they called dream incubation.After long exposure to the holistic practices and after signs and dreams or visions or other synchronistic events that told people it was time to incubate, people went on a dream quest, which is similar to Native American vision questing that's done in the wilderness, in the desert, on a mountaintop.The dream questing was originally done in the wilds in caves, but later evolved so that these sanctuaries were built and people did the dream questing in the sanctuaries.But the ultimate step in the healing process, after receiving all the holistic modalities and being strong enough, was to seek an encounter with divine powers through dreams or visions. And so people would go into a temple that was reserved for nothing else but encountering the divine powers.And they would have fasted and prayed and been in long term preparation. And then they would sleep on a couch that was called a clinikos. And our word clay and clinic comes from here.And what they would do is just lay there and pray and meditate and ask for help and sleep and watch their dreams and watch their visions until they had some kind of divine visit through dreams or visions or other strange events. We have records of over a thousand of these experiences. And they brought extraordinary dimensions of holistic healing like we could never imagine.People were sometimes healed in the dream, including warriors who had inoperable wounds, who in a dream saw Asclepius, the God of healing, or another mythic figure coming to them in the dream and taking out an arrowhead that was so deeply embedded in their chest that physicians didn't know how to take it out. But they had a dream surgery with where a divine figure came and extracted it, and they woke up in the morning and it had popped out.That's one example. Commonly, people had psychos, what we call psychosomatic conditions.And people were given either a dream healing in the dream or the recipe, the protocol for what they had to do to heal themselves. So I learned this, I read this, I studied this. Oh, the theaters are in this place of dream questing and holistic sanctuaries.And the Greek tragedies were written all by warriors for a mass social ritual of catharsis for everyone to cleanse from war pain, because everybody was exposed to it. And all this happened in the sanctuaries.And it was all preparation to meet the God of healing and try to get a dream or a vision that puts us back in balance and directs us to our destinies. So I studied it, I practiced it, and I eventually learned how to do it, and I do it.And so, yes, when I guide pilgrimages to Poros and other places in Greece, we do during the incubation, I begin preparing people long before I invent, invite that mythic identification. In Greece, I work with actors and actresses in the Greek tradition who use the tragedies for healing.And we go to Poros and we immerse in the tradition. We study our own dreams, we work with each other's myths.Who did you choose and why did you choose that character and tell us about your identification with that person? And eventually, as the penultimate experience, we do dream incubation.And people really do have extraordinary dreams, what Jung would call big dreams that give life changing guidance for healing and transformation and for finding our destinies.

That's amazing. I see why you keep going back and why you utilize it so much. Because it is, I mean, you talk to my soul.That whole conversation, it was something that you kind of have to really sit back and think the possibility. I believe in holistic and naturopathic modalities and healing.Anyway, so just the idea that there's a place that you can go to, a sanctuary that you can go to that you can literally embrace that to such a point that there is no judgment. There is. There is nothing but healing. There's healing.And that you can walk away from there with healing, whether it be mentally or physically, or in such a way that you can now move your life forward in a positive way is just profound. What an amazing. It just. What an amazing opportunity. We could talk for a whole other hour and. Easy, easy.

Well, maybe we'll do that sometime in.

The future, like, so fascinating. You have to come back, you know, I know that.As you wrote, we can call the ancient personifications known as gods and goddesses, the God powers, their embodiments, the images, the versions of the archetypes that are eternal in the personal, in the cultural and collective unconscious. You also say that we can invoke them to achieve experiences akin to the ancients.As Plato and Carl Jung both indicated, the forms of the archetypes are living forces. What can modern psychology learn from Poros and those ancient practices?Because what you just presented to me is to me much more beneficial, much more in depth, much more soul reaching than sitting in an office or laying on a couch in an office and talking things out.

If and when we talk things out, which isn't a bad thing, let's do soul talk. I did have on Poros one time when I was questioning myself about using these practices.I had a dream in which the dream said to me, soul talk is your medicine. Soul talk is not the same as ordinary everyday talk and it's not the same as problem solving. So one matter is, yeah, learn to do soul talk.Talk about the deepest and most, the ultimate dimensions of life. Yes, let's talk about our destinies less. Let's talk about, well, trauma in its original meaning.What so penetrated you that your soul was affected and afflicted and the entire universe changed for you at that moment or cumulatively over time from a lot of traumatic experiences.Let's find our mythic identifications not reduce ourselves to secular individuals who have a psychological disorder, but rather lift ourselves, ennoble ourselves, spiritualize our.Our challenges and conflicts so that we do see that we're on a mythic or a psycho spiritual journey through life and that whatever we're encountering is part of that. People should read the. Read, read, read the myths and the stories.And no offense to my psychological community, but the humanities tells us the stories far better than the psychologists.So yeah, read literature, read mythology, see good movies, find your story and identify with your story and realize your living a mythic journey and Take big risks. Find your way to a Native American reservation and dance with them. Come to Greece with me. Go on your own pilgrimage.Don't be satisfied with the conventional answers because the conventional answers just try to adapt us to a very unsatisfying conventional reality. Freud, that's all Freud was doing. He said reality is inherent or civilization and its discontents. Civilization is inherently dissatisfying.You will be discontent. And all I'm trying to do is help you adapt again to unhappy, unfulfilling conditions of love and work. Don't be satisfied with that. Be whatever it is.Find your spiritual path, including if you're an atheist. If you're an atheist, you have the higher, most difficult spiritual path because, oh, bless you, brother or sister.It's all up to you to create meaning in our universe you believe is empty.But we must, we must, we must be on some form of spiritual journey and tracking our lives and elevating and ennobling our journeys that way rather than allowing them to sink down into diagnosis and pathology and taking medications just so we can get up tomorrow morning.

Brilliant words of wisdom, Ed. Brilliant words of wisdom. I, I, I, I, I applaud you for, for those words. And I think we should all embrace them very much so.How can they find you and your books?

Yeah, well, my books are available at good bookstores and on Amazon and from the publisher. The three books you have up. Thank you. Are the three books that I've written on the Greek healing tradition.So dream healing came first and that's my discovery and beginning practice of the Asclepian tradition. Then Soul Medicine and now Passage to Paris was just published last month. A few people are really interested.They could read them in that order and discover as I discovered, because I do write my books to be journeys, not just entertainment or education. And my books on warrior war and warfare and warrior healing are War and the Soul and Warrior's Return.They're also both readily available at bookstores and on Amazon and from publishers. Publishers.My website is up there just edwardtick.com my email address is simple dredtickmail.com it's doc d r e D T I C K. And my son loves to make a joke and say that says dread tick. People aren't gonna use that. But he's the next generation, so it's okay. It makes sense.

Ed, thank you very much for being part of one with him. Before you go, I really sincerely appreciate sharing your journey and your experience and wisdom with us. One more thing before you go.Before we go, though. I always ask this kind of sort of differently. I think you kind of mostly answered it.But how do you hope your work will influence the way we think about spirit healing and connection to the divine?

Oh, thank you. I hope it will help restore those connections. That's all I want to do.If I can die with a smile because I helped some people reawaken and reconnect to their soul and live a soulful life, I'll die in peace.

Well, you connected my soul today in the brief introduction that we had spoken prior to our conversation and throughout this conversation. So I'm grateful that we have met and I will continue to push that forward. Thank you.

Good. Michael, thank you very much. And again, thank you for your sacrifice and service and for being so open to the invisible dimensions.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm grateful.From the sanctuaries of ancient Greece to the challenges of modern life, Dr. Edward Tick reminds us that healing is both timeless and transformative. His journey to Purah shows how dreams, visions, and sacred places can restore the spirit and reconnect us to eternal forces.So once again, Dr. Dick, thank you very much for sharing your wisdom and your experiences with us today for our listeners.His new book, Passage to In the Sanctuary of the Sea God is available now from Park Street Press, Amazon, and I'll have links to it and his website on the show notes so that you can easily click it and follow through with it. Explore all the opportunities that we have there for you. That's it for today's journey.If something sparked your curiosity or moved to share it, subscribe and stay connected and head over to YouTube to catch the full version of this video. Remember, you're not just listening, you're part of this story. So until next time, keep seeking, keep growing, and never stop asking.One more thing before you go.

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