Circling the Sacred Wheel

Reconstructed as a doable circuit from Andrews’s “circling the wheel” teaching. Use a real, current decision or stuck situation. You can mark four spots on the floor and physically move, or simply turn your attention in turn.

1. Name the question at the centre. Stand (or sit) at the centre of your imagined wheel and state the real decision plainly: “Should I _?” / “What do I do about _?” Hold it without answering yet.
2. South — the body and the ground. Face the first direction and ask the question from the body: What does my gut, my energy, my physical life say? What is the practical, grounded reality here — resources, health, what I can actually sustain? Note the felt answer before moving.
3. West — emotion and the inner dark. Turn to the next direction and ask from feeling and the shadow: What do I actually feel about this? What am I afraid of, grieving, or avoiding? Andrews frames the wheel as a place to find “what blocks your energy” — this is where the honest, uncomfortable material surfaces.
4. North — mind and clarity. Turn again and ask from cool reason: Stripped of fear and wish, what do the facts say? What would I advise a friend? What are the real options and consequences?
5. East — vision and meaning. Turn to the last direction and ask from the largest view: Which choice serves who I am becoming? What does this look like from the end of my life, or from my deepest values? What is the meaning I want to live toward?
6. Return to centre and integrate. Come back to the middle holding all four answers at once. Andrews’s point is that the decision made from the whole circle is wiser than one made from a single dominant direction. Write down what each direction said and what the four together now make obvious.
7. Act. Take one concrete next step. The wheel is for seeing clearly, not for waiting; once the whole picture is in view, move. (Sourcing note: Andrews’s direction attributes vary across her books and differ from other traditions’ wheels; the four vantage labels above are a faithful, usable rendering of “circling the wheel to see the whole picture,” not a fixed canonical correspondence.)

Lynn V. Andrews (c.1940–2022) used the sacred wheel of the four directions throughout the Medicine Woman series and devoted Teachings Around the Sacred Wheel (1990) to it, attributing it to her teachers Agnes Whistling Elk and Ruby Plenty Chiefs.

A necessary note on the evidence on lineage. The “medicine wheel” is a real and sacred element of several Native American traditions, and Andrews’s accounts of receiving it from a Cree “Sisterhood of the Shields” are widely disputed — read by many scholars and Native writers as fiction and as “plastic shamanism” that appropriates and distorts genuine indigenous practice.

This entry makes no claim of authentic indigenous transmission and does not present Andrews’s wheel as a real Native medicine wheel. It offers only the generic, transmissible psychological device — structured four-angle perspective-taking — and disclaims both the lineage claims and the idea that the directions carry objective metaphysical powers.

Forcing a problem through several fixed vantage points is a widely reinvented thinking tool; Andrews’s version is distinctive in its embodied, four-direction circular form and sacred-feminine framing: - Six Thinking Hats (Edward de Bono) — the secular cousin: deliberately switch among fixed modes (facts, feelings, caution, optimism, creativity, process) one at a time.

• Geomancy’s Shield Chart (Stephen Skinner) — a fixed symbolic structure as a mirror for a question, but read as figures rather than walked as directions.
• The despacho (Villoldo) — also uses the four directions, but as a gratitude-offering ritual rather than a decision-framing circuit.
• Recapitulation (Castaneda) — reviewing the self from a stalking, detached vantage.

Letting one direction dominate anyway. The discipline is to give each vantage a real, separate turn — especially West (the feeling/shadow you’d rather skip). Don’t let North’s reasoning answer South’s gut.

• Treating it as divination. The wheel surfaces your material; it doesn’t foretell or decide. Own the choice.
• Skipping the centre integration. The value is in holding all four at once at the end, not in four disconnected musings. Write them down side by side.
• Vague question. “What should I do with my life?” is too big to circle usefully. Pick one concrete decision.
• Circling forever. It is a tool for seeing, then acting. Once the whole picture is in view, take the next real step.