Crying for A Vision Part 1
WAKAN TANKA, Great Spirit, teach me how to trust my heart, my mind, my intuition, my inner knowing, the senses of my body, the blessings of my spirit. Teach me to trust these things so that I may enter my sacred space and love beyond my fear, and thus Walk in balance with the passing of each glorious Sun. ~ A Lakota Prayer (Preparing for my first Vision Quest summer of 2015, creating my Chanupa.) I participated in my first Lakota Sweat Lodge ceremony, an inipi, at the end of June 2015. It was something I had wanted to do for a really long time. An inipi, or sweat lodge ceremony, is a purification ritual meaning ‘to live again’. It involves the five elements of earth, water, air, fire, and ether (spirit) at once. When you enter the sweat lodge you do so on 'bended knee' representing humility. We crawl around the rock pit clockwise to take a seat on Mother Earth, men on one side, women on the other. The sweat lodge represents the womb of our Pachamama, Earth Moth