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 Mother. We are being purified and
sanctified in the darkness of ‘Her’ nurturing womb. There are four rounds in
the sweat lodge, meaning the door opens four times. Seven ‘Grandfathers’, our most ancient ancestors on earth, are brought into the lodge on each round. They, (the hot rocks), are fed with sweet grass,
cedar, lavender, or other precious medicines each round filling the lodge with
fragrant scents. Then, Mni wakhan, sacred water, is poured onto the rocks causing hot
steam to fill the lodge once the door is closed. Prayers are then given,
songs are sung, and insights are gained in every round while sitting in that sacred darkness.
Round one is a prayer round for inviting in the Spirits into the lodge to be with
us; round two, is a prayer round asking Tunkashila, Wakan Tanka, which means Grandfather, or Great Spirit, for what we desire for are friends, family, humanity, ourselves, and
our precious Earth Mother; round three is a healing round. Healing prayers are sung and
healing energy is available to all who desire it; round four is the closing
round where prayers of thankfulness, appreciation, and gratitude are given as the
helping Spirits are released from the sacred inipi ceremony. Coming out of the sweat
lodge represents coming out of the darkness and welcoming in the Sacred Light.
It represents re-birth, being born again, being cleansed, purified, and refined.
Then chanupa’s, the sacred Lakota pipe, are smoked in a hochoka, a sacred
circle. Food is offered on a spirit plate with prayers of gratitude in a wophila,
a celebration of thanksgiving. After which, we all may eat together and share our experiences.
My first inipi experience
was amazing. I was not prepared for the intense feelings and visions that
occurred while I was in that hot, dark, sacred space. My ‘Great-grandfather’
came to me once again with another amazing vision for my continued journey on
this indigenous path. In one part of my vision with him, he handed me a sacred
pipe to carry. He gave it to me and explained that I would be doing vision quests
with it in my future. Also in my vision, I met Basil Braveheart. The adopted
father of my dear cousin and the tribal leader she was under. It was a very
powerful experience for me to say the least. I cried blissful tears throughout
the entire ceremony! The sweat lodge ritual
takes several hours. I was gone from 5pm-11pm that Friday night in June of 2015. I could not
have predicted how physically exhausting, mentally surprising, and emotionally
demanding this first sweat lodge would be for me. I barely remember driving home.
I was
still
‘in Spirit’ with the experience of that night. I was completely wiped out physically,
emotionally, and mentally for the next 48 hours processing all that had
occurred in that inspiring inipi.
My wonderful cousin is a Sun Dancer with the Lakota tribe under Basil BraveHeart. Basil
is a Lakota Elder, teacher, and writer. He has written his personal story in a
book called The Spiritual Journey of a Brave Heart. She has danced under
his altar for many years now. She holds sweat lodges several times a year at
her home, which is where I had participated in my first sweat lodge. When I told her about
my vision in the lodge, she questioned me concerning it. It turned out she had
a special stone for a pipe waiting for its owner. By the end of our visit, she
gifted me with that stone for my new pipe. The day she gave it to me was
another special, sacred, spiritual moment that I will never forget. I am
honored to be its carrier. I received my stone on July 11th, 2015. At the end of July, I
was privileged to attend a sacred women’s retreat that Basil Braveheart has put
together for the healing of women. I received some incredible, much needed, healing
energy work while at that retreat, taking years of pain away from where I
stored it in my lower back, easing my arthritic aches and stiffness for many
months. It was an extremely mystical and poignant experience for me. That retreat
marked the beginning of my preparation for my first hanbleceya, a vision quest.
Hanbleceya means ‘crying
for a vision or a dream’. This is another ancient rite of passage practiced by
many Indigenous cultures varying in techniques. Vision quests are taken to
discover greater meaning and purpose in life, to have sacred communion with the
Great Mystery, Tunkasila, to get answers or solutions to challenges, to connect
with ancestors, spirit animals, and our Earth Mother. It requires personal sacrifice
through fasting, prayer, and valuable time spent alone in Nature. It humbles
you. It can bring answers to your questions, or questions for you to answer,
through visions and insights. This is a sacred ritual carried out in a traditional
manner. It was an honor for me
to participate in this revered practice for the first time in September of 2015.
There was a great deal of preparation to do before my vision quest. Preparing
for hanbleceya was extremely important to me. I wanted to do everything I could
to make this a sacred and memorable experience for me. However, I often questioned
my capacity to fulfill all of my responsibilities in order to successfully
carry out this endeavor because many times fear would consume my heart as I
thought about being alone on the mountain side with just my thoughts, exposed to the elements and Nature. This was
a daunting thing for me to attempt. I have never been alone in the mountains
for a good reason, my extremely irrational fear of bears! Sleeping
under the stars sounds enjoyable in theory, but I was terrified to actually do
it. Steven Pressfield, in The War
of Art, said, “Are you paralyzed with
fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator.
Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more
scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do
it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the
strength of resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific
enterprise, the more certain we can be that the enterprise is important to us
and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much resistance. If it
meant nothing to us, there’d be no resistance.” This was a lesson I would
learn very early on, and quite clearly, while on my vision quest. Fear would be
my personal trainer on that first night alone on the mountain side.
Three
very important parts of preparing for my vision quest were creating my sacred
pipe, creating the 405 prayer ties, and creating four prayer flags to hold up
my prayer ties for my hochoka. I carved the stone for my
pipe by hand, filing it for hours. It was a very challenging task for me. It
had been drilled and was in the basic L shape, but it was up to me to make it
beautiful, smooth, and shiny. After a lot of work, I finally had a pleasantly
shaped stone that fit perfectly into the wooden stem of my pipe. I made many,
many prayer ties, 105 white, 100 yellow, 100 red, and 100 blue, two inch squares
of cloth filled with tobacco, blue corn meal, and a prayer. I put a sacred,
special prayer into each one of them as I tied them
onto
one very long continuous piece of cotton string. They would surround me in a
sacred circle, called a hochoka, where I would pray for a few days without food
or water. Lakota vision quests are typically four days and three nights. Before
I could go on my vision quest, my chanupa had to have a vision quest of its own
to ‘wake up’. Two weeks before we went out, we had a sweat lodge ceremony for
my new chanupa. It was Saturday August 29th, 2015, the night of another beautiful super full moon. This would be the start of my sacred pipe’s vision quest to
awaken. That sweat lodge was a women only sweat lodge. It had a completely
different feel than the first time I did a sweat lodge ceremony, just two
months prior. This one was so peaceful. The first time I had participated in an
inipi, I cried intensely while seeing visions throughout the entire ceremony.
The second time was just the opposite. No visions, no intense feelings, only
profound peace, and tranquility, were experienced by me in that second sweat lodge. It was perfect! I did
have a hip injury at the time which I was concerned about for my vision quest.
While I was in the sweat lodge, my pain was completely taken away during the
healing round. I had another unbelievable healing, my second healing in a month
from these amazing Lakota ways. The healing I experienced, and the peacefulness, continued to be with me long after the lodge was over. I was very grateful for
the relief from my pain, the profound peace, and the knowledge that I would be
protected while on my vision quest. It was very comforting, like someone had wrapped
me up in a nice warm blanket while I was in that sweat lodge. Peace was constantly with me, even as I went about my preparations over the following days. My chanupa
rested in the sweat lodge from Saturday night until Tuesday night, September 1st, 2015 Then, we had another sweat lodge ceremony to end the vision quest of my sacred pipe.
At that sweat lodge, there were only four women present making it a very personal, intimate experience, smoking my pipe for the first time.
2018 is going to be an incredible year. I hope to be able to go on another vision quest this summer before I turn 50! Next post I will share my experiences on the mountain and it's significance today now that we are in the Age of Aquarius.
Namaste!
(Copy and paste all links)
www.iamsacredlight.com
www.sacredlights.net
My YouTube Channel Sacred Light
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpZXFp40f4k40LYshzXyl2Q?view_as=subscriber
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