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# 2021-01-19 - The Healing Wisdom of Africa by Malidoma Patrice Somé
This is an important book that gives a valuable perspective on
healing. It contains thought-provoking reflections on Western
culture. I was surprised by the familiarity of the indigenous
perspectives. I have heard similar sentiments from other writers and
ritual leaders came from Asia, India, and North America. This book
clearly expresses its ideas. I get the feeling that the author has
invested a lot of life force into making friends with the enemy and
building bridges.
I liked the point about individuality versus individualism. Much is
said about individualism and the hazards of getting stuck in our
problems. The author repeatedly emphasizes that the key is to escape
isolation. Confronted with polarities, we need to find positive
activities that we can do together. In other words, the more energy
we invest into having fun, the less energy we will invest in fighting.
I also liked the point about doing work out of fullness, focusing on
fulfilment rather than prosperity. In other words, doing your work
in such a way that it charges you up rather than draining your energy.
Below are salient quotes.
> Everyone is gifted. This means that everyone has something to
> give. Sometimes we are the last people to recognize our own gifts.
> So many people in the modern world, caught between their
> commitment to survival and their intuitive allegiance to a genuine
> life purpose, find themselves forced to sacrifice their purpose to
> make a living... Their very livelihood undermines their reason for
> being.
> In the West people usually translate the problem into some type
> of either/or duality, where someone is right and someone [else] is
> wrong, someone is a winner and someone [else] is a loser. Conflict
> becomes an opportunity for instant polarization. Wherever polarity
> exists, there is a state of competitiveness that does not serve to
> meet the needs in a community, since it tends to separate rather
> than unite.
> Indigenous societies conceded the existence of conflict but view
> it as something of importance and of interest to the community.
> The conflict is some sort of message to the entire community--but
> expressed through the individuals embroiled in the conflict.
> The purpose is not so much the desire to get the job done but to
> raise enough energy for people to feel nourished by what they do.
> You are nourished first, and then the work flows out of your
> fullness.
Below are excerpts and [notes] for my own future reference.
# Introduction
School, to us, was a place where we learned to reject whatever native
culture we had acquired as children and to fill its place with
Western ideas and practices. This foreign culture was presented as
high culture par excellence, the acquisition of which constituted a
blessing. Going to school was thus a radical act involving the
sacrifice of one's indigenous self. For the white Catholic
missionaries who were building a Christian empire, such a project was
necessary for survival, a consequence of the decline of Christian
faith in Europe.
Consequently, they created a diaspora of struggling people adrift in
the vast sea of cultural anonymity. This gave rise to what has now
entered the canon of nationalistic literature known as négritude,
spearheaded by figures such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, former
president of Sénégal, and now a member of the French academy.
Négritude is the owning of being black in the face of white
rejection of blacks.
Literacy was literally beaten into us, and to avoid pain we had to
quickly master European languages.
The grave problem related to this manner of education is that its
fanaticism breeds fanaticism in the student. You can't beat someone
into enlightenment without fearing that this violence will be
returned to you someday.
Exposure to the magical can be as dangerous to a person as exposure
to high levels of radiation. Without proper protection one runs the
risk of losing one's self to the very world that radiates these
energies.
In the West, one can find indigenous cultural elements embedded in
American culture if one knows where to look for them. The widespread
fascination with antiquities, adventure travel, and tribal artifacts
reveals a culture hungry to connect with indigenous roots.
I remember a conversation in which a student, bemused by the fact
that I came all the way from Africa to study at a prestigious school
in America, asked if Africans preferred to sleep in trees. When i
told him that, in fact, the American ambassador slept in the biggest
tree in the capital, he became visibly upset with me and walked away.
[I truly appreciate this story. *grin*]
I noticed that some people, particularly those who were most
enthralled by the game of consumerism, found mention of indigenous
wisdom especially irritating and sometimes would lash out at me, just
as a child entranced by a Nintendo game reacts with tantrums to any
disturbance. ... Time and time again, I have been faced with angry
questions like, "If Africans are so full of wisdom, why are they
shooting each other? Why can't they stop famine?"
I ask in response, "Where do these weapons come from?" Colonialism
weakens a native people by, among other things, sapping its economy
and creating scarcity. Everyone knows that scarcity results in the
loss of human dignity. A person whose identity has been violated
becomes subject to control. If a gun is then given to such a person
to use as a way of restoring his sense of dignity, chances are he
will use it. My people are frustrated by the lack of credibility
they experience from the modern world, and many have lost hope that
anything but the gun will be heard. This book is a response to and a
reaction against such thinking.
This book will probably challenge your beliefs. I do not expect that
you will come to agree with me on every point. But perhaps you can
understand how the beliefs in this book form a coherent system for
understanding the world. At the very least, the beliefs deserve a
respect and reverence they seldom receive.
You will find instead some ways of looking at the human being and at
society that you may not have considered before. My goal is not to
convert you to an indigenous point of view, but to offer and
recommend that view as a potential enrichment to your present life.
It is possible that we have been brought together at this time
because we have profound truths to teach each other.
# Chapter 1: Healing, Ritual, and Community
What the indigenous world offers to the modern world centers around
the understanding of the concepts of healing, ritual, and community.
Healing is central, because it was learned very early that human
beings are vulnerable to physiological and biological breakdown, and
that this general instability touches all aspects of their existence.
They have also learned that the natural environment in which they
live is made up of subtle invisible things that, if manipulated in
certain ways, can affect the conditions that they intend to heal.
Ritual is the technology that allows the manipulation of these subtle
energies. Community is important because there is an understanding
that human beings are collectively oriented. The general health and
well-being of an individual are connected to a community, and are not
something that can be maintained alone or in a vacuum.
Ritual in the indigenous world is something aimed at producing
healing, and the loss of such healing in the modern world might be
responsible for the loss of community that we see. The problems
experienced in the West, from the pain of isolation to the stress of
hyperactivity, are brought on by the loss of community.
When we talk of ritual here we are talking about something much
deeper [than the ceremonies found in certain organized religions.] We
are talking about the weaving of individual persons and gifts into a
community that interacts with the forces of the natural world. We
are talking about a gathering of people with a clear healing vision
and a trusting intent toward the forces of the invisible world.
The indigenous understanding is that the material and physical
problems that a person encounters are important only because they are
an energetic message sent to this visible world. Therefore, people
go to that unseen energetic place to try to repair whatever damage or
disturbances are being done there, knowing that if things are healed
there, things will be healed here. Ritual is the principle tool used
to approach that unseen world in a way that will rearrange the
structure of the physical world and bring about material
transformation.
That we connect with unseen realities, the realities made visible in
our symbols, is crucial to the well-being of our psyches. A person
who walks through a ritual and ends up feeling charged and
invigorated is a blessed recipient of healing waves of energy that no
one can see but everyone can benefit from. The full head of a person
blessed in this manner overflows into the needy souls of others...
I finally decided that I needed at least to justify why indigenous
people do ritual grieving, even if I failed to make it apply to
modern people. So I spoke about grief as a cleansing practice that
purifies the psyche just as a bath purifies the body. I stated the
dangers of unexpressed grief, quoting an elder who once said that a
man who can't cry is a social time bomb.
I sent them to find each an object among the trees that represented
the loss they needed to grieve. This much they did without
resistance.
What was it that urged these people to search for healing? My sense
is that the West's need for it is rooted in crises of personal
identity and purpose.
Our own confirmation or acknowledgment of ourselves is not enough.
The need to be acknowledged by the society is so primal that if it
does not happen in the village, town, or neighborhood, people will go
out searching for it. [In other words, they need to feel a sense of
belonging.]
A crisis of identity and purpose is an inner burning that is rarely
extinguished by a visit to a career planning office, by graduation
from a prestigious school, or even by years in a successful career.
It is a hollowness, a void that threatens to erase meaning in
everything people do.
Initiation is simply a set of challenges presented to an individual
so that he or she may grow. Consequently, the troubles we encounter
in our paths in the modern world are, in essence, initiatory to the
extent that each one of them is life changing.
What is lacking in this rich life experience is a community that
observes the individual's growth... the mere act of seeing and
responding, which enables a person, in powerful periods of growth, to
behold voices within confirmed by voices from the community without.
I would like to stress at this point that where mentors and elders
are lacking, where initiation in one form or another is not
recognized, there can be no support system capable of curbing the
intense sense of aloneness that haunts the psyche of the modern
person.
Another form of this illness is the inability to accept or even
tolerate those who are different than us.
Ritual is aimed at increasing our awareness, for awareness of the
existence of the reality beyond the palpable world that we live in is
one of the keys to transforming an individual. ... If something comes
into our lives and we deny it by labeling it impossible, an
indigenous elder would interpret this way of thinking as a
manifestation of our own rigidity in the face of new possibilities.
Eventually such awareness becomes an honoring of the shadowy and
hidden parts of ourselves, those parts of ourselves that are
invisible ... more often than not the physical being is so detached
from the spirit that one feels split inside. Awareness should often
lead to an attempt to bring these two parts of the person together to
become one.
Inside ritual and sacred space where energies are being woven,
people's imagination and consciousness can be moved through time
backward or forward. It is as if the awakened psyche is pulled
toward those materials it was not able to recall otherwise. This is
a shamanic journey... The kind of memory that we are talking about
here is something very personal, very compelling, and very
transformative.
Purpose begins with the individual, and the sum total of all the
individuals' purposes creates the community's purpose.
Being born into this world is a trying experience. Whatever
enthusiasm you bring with you here can be tamed down and radically
edited simply as a result of being here.
Making ritual a part of daily life will help to rekindle the
intensity that keeps us on the path of our purpose.
Ritual is not a rigid thing. Simply by virtue of being a human
being, one is an authority on creating ritual.
If people know the problem that they are confronting, they are
capable of devising a ritual that will handle this problem. ... If
you start by trusting yourself and your ability to address an issue
symbolically, you are likely to deepen your experience in designing a
ritual. Rituals never like to be done the same way twice, for they
would rather reflect the versatility of human imagination than its
corresponding power to create stagnation and rigidity.
In order for ritual to manifest its full power, it must be connected
to the world of nature...
# Chapter 2: The Healing Power of Nature
Our relation to the natural world and its natural laws determines
whether or not we are healed. Nature, therefore, is the foundation
of healing, and the type of nature that surrounds a community at the
time of doing a ritual determines the types of ritual that are
appropriate... So if something in us must change, spending time in
nature provides a good beginning. This means that within nature,
within the natural world, are all of the materials and tenets needed
for healing human beings. Nature is the textbook for those who care
to study it and the storehouse of remedies for human ills.
Being born into this world in a particular place is like having the
signature of that place stamped upon you.
Had I not encountered beings like them [the kontomblé] many more
times as an educated adult and conversed with them while taping their
voices with their permission for my own record, I think I would have
dismissed my original experience as a kind of hallucination.
It has made me wonder, every time I am walking in nature, about who
is looking at me, who is observing me, and how many eyes are seeing
everything that I do without my knowing it.
After the experience with the green lady, I couldn't get myself to
cut a live tree, because I never knew what I was cutting.
A community is held together by emotional ties that result in a
conscious feeling of connection... It is more important to heal our
relation with nature by doing our own emotional work rather than by
seeking extraordinary experiences that appear supernaturally powered.
For those of us who are not called to work directly with the
spirits, our work consists in healing relationships where we
experience separation and brokenness. We can begin this work by
reconnecting, in the first place, with the natural world.
# Chapter 3: Indigenous Technologies
In the West, technology is usually defined as applying knowledge to
serve a purpose; among the Dagara and many other cultures, technology
is what keeps the individuals and the relationships between
individuals and nature healthy. Technologies in the indigenous world
do not enslave people, because they include the world of Spirit.
What indigenous and Western peoples have in common is the desire to
understand the intricacies and complexities of the world we live in
and to harness the power of nature for certain practical purposes.
In the West, technology is oriented toward industry, commercial, and
military uses; among indigenous people, it serves to heal and help
people remember and fulfill their purpose in life.
In order to exist as material beings, we have to take a form, and
then in the sense among my people that to be in material is not the
most familiar or suitable form for us. The contracted form of our
volatile spirit is the body. The adventures of the body prepare the
spirit for the leap into its next phase of growth.
There is a reciprocity here that really cancels out the whole sense
of hierarchy. If Spirit is looking up to us, and we are looking up
to Spirit, then we are looking up to each other, and human beings
should take from this a certain sense of dignity. The industrialized
world and the indigenous world need to look up to each other.
Peoples attraction to material things is proportional to their thirst
for the source from which things come. To indigenous people, matter
is the skin of Spirit, a permeable boundary between the dimensions.
This is an extremely important subject, for we cannot assume that
people either have or do see the same things. However, if you are
looking only for shadows you will see only shadows; to see Spirit you
must revert to your spiritual sight. This is similar to what in the
West is called ecstatic perception.
For instance, when women get together to make pottery, they are
acknowledging that their ability to create is part of nature's
design, a part of their purpose. Before a woman participates in the
work with clay, which is the earth, she will first gather the signs
and images she has seen in nature, and she will bring these signs
into the circle of other women. In the interest of producing
something that is an extension of their wholeness, the women will
begin by chanting and singing together, echoing one another. The
work is not in the form of a production line, even though a
production line would have yielded more than enough of these
practical containers. Nor do the women work alone. Each person has
clay. They are seated in a circle, and they chant until they are in
some sort of ecstatic place, and it is from that place that they
begin molding the clay. It is as if the knowledge of how to make
pots is not in their brains, but in their collective energy. The
product becomes an extension of the collective energy of the circle
of women.
I have watched this process unfold countless times. The women can
sit all day in front of two dozen mounds of clay, doing nothing but
chanting--until the last hours, when in a flurry of activity all
kinds of pots come forth. Imagine a job where two-thirds of the time
was spent chanting, and one-third was spend in production! The
product of work here, the pot, embodies the intimacy and wholeness
experienced by the women over the course of the day. The women
understand that it is necessary to reach that place of wholeness
before they can bring something out of it.
As a result of our work practices, the indigenous notion of abundance
is very different from that in the West. Abundance means a sense of
fullness... The purpose is not so much the desire to get the job
done but to raise enough energy for people to feel nourished by what
they do. You are nourished first, and then the work flows out of
your fullness.
I remember my mother uttering very moving, poetic chants as she
milled grain, grinding for six hours to fill only a small bucket.
The meal that came out of her work contained tremendous energy, the
spiritual energy of the poetry and music as well as the physical
energy contained in the grain. All of her work was a work of art,
done so genuinely, with total devotion, that it contributed to a
profound sense of fullness in the family.
What I must emphasize here is that the energy required to sustain the
harmony we are talking about is so delicate that it can easily be
destroyed by the slightest intrusion, and such intrusion has clearly
taken place through colonialism.
# Chapter 4: The Value of a Healthy Community
As Carolyn Shaffer and Kristin Anundsen point out in their ambitious
and detailed book, Creating Community Anywhere, Americans have
defined themselves in terms of individual freedom: a people breaking
away from old, limiting structures, dogmas, and attitudes and pushing
forward to new frontiers. But with every gain there is a loss.
Individuality, not individualism, is the cornerstone of community.
Individuality is synonymous with uniqueness.
These examples suggest that what is required for the maintenance and
growth of a community is not corporate altruism or a government
program, but a villagelike atmosphere that allows people to drop
their masks. A sense of community grows where behavior is based on
trust and where no one has to hide anything.
To produce beauty consistently requires a healthy community.
Therefore the artist is the pulse of the community; her or his
creativity says something about the health of the community.
In such a place of struggle, the longing for the sacred is so
enhanced that people are collecting and storing art objects. From an
indigenous point of view, the isolation of self and community from
Spirit appears to have translated into the imprisonment of art. The
museums of the West, from an indigenous perspective, speaks
poignantly of the sharply felt longing for spirit experienced by
modern people.
The difference is that in the modern world, errant behavior in a
person is regarded as a personal problem, concerning only that
individual. The possibility that there is a larger meaning to be
found in the person's expressions, which might be transformed into
something meaningful for that person's community, is rarely
considered.
In an indigenous community, each person is precious. No one is born
on this earth without a reason, a special purpose. Failure or
inability to perform one's function in the village places a person in
a constant state of crisis. So crises from either of these two
sources--the embodiment of a new spirit wanting to emerge, and the
impossibility of doing what one came into the village to do--must be
addressed by the community.
# Chapter 5: Mentors and the Life of Youth
There are certain things without which young people cannot survive
and flourish, and mentoring is one of them. At the core of mentoring
is the understanding that genius must be invited out of a person.
People carry to this world something important that they must
deliver, and mentors help to deliver that genius to the community.
Because genius is sacred, originating not in this world but another,
it must be approached ritualistically, that is, symbolically--with
respect and even reverence. ... genius understands the language of
ritual better than any other language.
Indigenous people tend to approach emotion, and sometimes even pain,
as a sacred thing because they think it means that something in the
person is moving out in order to let something else come in. The
tension between the incoming and outgoing energies produces pain. So
the pain involved in bringing genius to birth evokes ritual. The
stretching of the body's physiology out of its normal parameters,
which is what allows the shift to happen, is supported through
ritual, as a serious and sacred thing.
Literacy represents a kind of clairvoyant knowledge that diviners
think does not agree with magical knowledge. Their approach may be a
reaction to colonialism, for the brutality perpetrated on indigenous
people under colonial rule came from literate people. So it is easy
for indigenous diviners to conclude that literacy is a violent
knowledge bent on attacking any nonliterate knowledge.
Therefore the first form mentoring must take is simply seeing the
presence of genius in a young person. It begins with paying careful
attention to the young person. The best medicine for a young man in
crisis is listening [being listened to]. Listening equals respect
and recognition. Recognition begins with supportive attention.
As long as someone is in crisis, mentoring is called for. The
violence that cripples so many lives is a tearing consequence of a
call for mentoring that has met no answer. Yet to mentor requires
some giving of the self, some willingness to compromise in the
interest of establishing a progressively healthy psyche and spirit in
the other. This includes the willingness to be vulnerable, to learn
gently about the world of the other, instead of jumping to
conclusions about the plight of the other, and it also requires
finding a way into the emotional world that produced the crisis.
The mentor exists, in the West, in the counselor and the therapist.
# Chapter 6: Elders and the Community
The full blossoming out of youth requires taking risks. It demands
that one be safe enough to respond to the urge for growth. That
safety comes from the hands of older generations. This is where
young and old intersect. Here, old means someone who is dry, solid,
lasting. Thus the old and the elders embody stability,
dependability, and wisdom. In this capacity, they become a frame of
reference, a resource, a research center.
The wisdom I am trying to point out here for Westerners is obvious.
I am trying to say that a retirement house is the wrong place for old
people to be. While they are there waiting for their end, the entire
society loses a great opportunity: the opportunity to be anchored and
thus blessed.
Elders, like the ancestors, are expected to identify and address what
is not working in the village, not to give compliments and praise
behavior. Thus elders do not express energy, they hold it. When
they speak, everybody listens. They often don't speak directly to
the person whose situation they are addressing. They don't even name
the person. The reason for this indirectness is linked to a rather
peculiar understanding of shame and the effect of shaming.
Shame is seen in Dagara culture as a collapsing emotional force that
paralyzes the self, and therefore, like grief, shame should be
experienced only in a sacred, ceremonial context. In the context of
ritual and sacred space, the repentant "sinner" is said to be more
capable of deep humility than in an ordinary context. When suffered
in daily life, shame compresses the psyche dangerously. The result
is that one experiences crippling rejection and ostracism as one's
self-esteem is almost exterminated. A person in power and respect
who uses it exposes himself and the other to danger.
Distrust, suspicion, and discord are the offspring of shame and
attacks against self-esteem. Therefore shaming someone as a way of
making that person accountable without the sacred endangers the whole
community. The heaviness of the shamed person will in the long run
and in subtle ways affect everyone and everything.
Accountability in the form of punishment is debilitating: it
encourages concealment, secrecy, and even distortion of reality.
The greatest responsibility of the elder is leading rituals.
In the culture of the West now, it is easier for someone to become an
elder to their grandchildren than to anyone else because a grandchild
spontaneously listens to and respects a grandparent. But I would
also venture to say that there is something of an elder in any person
whose words are listened to and who commands respect and attention.
Elders also appear as people who have profoundly changed the lives of
others through their teaching or writing.
There is an elder in the making in everyone, but it is most visible
in those who have the receptivity to listen to the stories of others.
The ability to listen, and the willingness to support others in
different situations, are at the heart and soul of elderhood.
Everyone who solicits the services of an elder-to-be is looking for a
container to unload some problems.
Similarly, anyone who attends to the sorrows of another person and
does not feel overwhelmed or frightened is a person who nurses an
elder within.
Above all, to be an elder is to be able to come down to the level of
the person you wish to listen to, not with a mind to tell that person
what to do and what not to do but to share similar experiences you
have had in the course of your own life.
If a culture rejects the sacred, it rejects elders. If it rejects
elders, it rejects the welfare of its youth. You can't have one
without the other.
We must learn how to sit quietly with our youth and to listen quietly
to what they have to say. This is the job of elders. This calm,
almost meditative approach to youth can also be a model for
self-calming to other people who are too troubled to be quiet.
Calmness is the beginning of the ability to hold the space, the
beginning of an elder's contribution to the community.
# Chapter 7: The Elements of Ritual
Every time a gathering of people, under the protection of Spirit,
triggers a body of emotional energy aimed at bringing them very
tightly together, a ritual of one type or another is in effect. In
this kind of gathering people primarily use nonverbal means of
interacting with one another, thereby stimulating the life of the
psyche.
There are two parts to ritual. One part is planned: people prepare
the space for the ritual and think through the general choreography
of the process. The other part of ritual cannot be planned because
it is the part that Spirit is in charge of. The unplanned part of
ritual is spontaneous, almost unpredictable interaction with an
energy source. It is a response to a call from a non-human source to
commune with a larger horizon. It is like a journey. Before you get
started, you own the journey. After you start, the journey owns you.
It is important to recognize what ritual is not. It is not
repetitive or compulsive behavior, like having a coffee or cigarette
in the morning. Nor is it an everyday formality, like greeting
another person with a handshake... Ritual... is gathering with
others in order to feel spirit's call, to express spontaneously and
publicly whatever emotion needs to be expressed, to create, in
concert with others, an unrehearsed and deeply moving response to
Spirit, and to feel the presence of the community, including the
ancestors, throughout the experience.
From an indigenous point of view, ceremonies are events that are
reproducible, predictable, and controllable, while rituals call for
spontaneous feeling and trust in the outcome.
Symbols are the doorway to ritual. Just as our bodies can't survive
without nourishment, our psyches cannot sustain themselves without
symbols.
Two types of rituals are commonly practiced among the Dagara. The
first one is called radical ritual since it involves major repair of
the broken or damaged human psyche or spirit. In such a ritual, the
physical body is pushed to the extreme in order to create a situation
of tension favorable for the removal of unwanted energetic debris at
the restoration of a much more acceptable self. The second one is
called maintenance ritual. It is a nonstressful yet regular practice
of acknowledging an existing connection with the Other World, the
world of Spirit.
Types of Ritual:
* Radical Ritual - body is pushed to the extreme [induce catharsis?]
* Maintenance Ritual - regular practice [stay connected to spirit]
* Personal Rituals - keep self in harmony with surrounding world [a
sub-set of Maintenance Rituals]
There are four components of a ritual:
* Prepare the ritual space
* The Invocation: a form of prayer that formally invites Spirit, or
any kind of personal deity, to join or participate in what is about
to happen.
* Healing: [Without healing, a ritual is not successful.]
* The Closing: an expression of gratitude for what the presence of
Spirit has allowed to happen. You can't simply say thank you; it
is very important to itemize the things that you are thankful for.
Because of our tendency to assert control, we need to be aware that
our controlling self may try to kick in during ritual. One signal
that this has happened is the feeling that the ritual has become more
like theater, with an embarrassing superficiality. In a play, people
go into scripted rage and weep synchronized tears. It is the duty of
the ritual leader to rid the process of any such pretense...
This is not to say that acting is always bad in ritual. The key is
genuineness of purpose; every action needs to be focused toward the
pure intention of seeking healing.
Ritual is necessary because there are certain problems that cannot be
resolved with words alone. The pain of abuse that someone carries
within, the trauma of unfulfilled dreams, and the sorrow of loss are
not the kind of feelings that go away over time. Whether we deny
them or not, they remain as part of the weight that keeps our bodies
tensed and our spirits constricted. They fuel our drive to violence,
and they eat our spirit. When they are addressed in ritual, however,
we get the chance to heal them. Complex problems plague and cripple
entire communities; by actively involving the member of the community
in seeking solutions based in ritual, a community can achieve a
deeper solution than words and rhetoric alone can provide. Breaking
the spell of circular arguments through the power of ritual is an
area where indigenous people can provide effective help to the West.
# Chapter 8: Dagara Cosmology and ritual
Cultures define themselves in terms of the ways their people perceive
the cosmos. [I think that this is inescapable.]
# Chapter 9: Preparing for Ritual
Anthropologist Victor Turner has given us an instructive picture of
the difference between indigenous and modern approaches to ritual.
In The Ritual Process he refers to ascending symbolism as opposed to
descending symbolism in order to clarify the distinction between
indigenous ritual practices and Western ceremonial practices.
The Western view of authority as something that comes from above
dramatically affects one's perception of the source of transformation
and change. The assumption is that if anything transcendental is
going to happen, it has to come from above and descend to humans.
Ever since Christianity unearthed the gods and goddesses and sent
them far away above the clouds, many people in the West have been
left standing on the ground feeling abandoned, staring longingly at
the sky wondering when God will come. In contrast, indigenous people
see the divine as arising from below. Indeed, the ancestors, who
dwell under the earth and form a vast pool of energy, allow us to
walk upon them. Thus the divine is right under our feet and directly
connected to us through the earth. This perception calls for a
significantly different attitude that encourages spontaneity and
trust of one's instincts, because it sees redemption and healing as
rising like heat from the divine below. Ritual therefore follows an
ascending principle, presuming that healing rises from under the
earth and overtakes us.
Participants need to understand that success in a ritual is
proportional to the level of surrender that one can achieve.
Surrender is a difficult thing to achieve; it is impossible to do it
with words or discourse.
In the West more than anywhere else, the lack of community has
increased the need for personal rituals. Personal rituals are
generally done to keep oneself in harmony with the surrounding world.
Personal rituals are for the most part maintenance rituals.
Ancestor rituals help to heal the ancestors themselves and our
connections with them.
Another form of personal ritual is that which honors and develops our
connections to spirit allies.
The first thing to recognize is that in community ritual, one is
required to give something to the gathering. It takes the combined
energies of many givers to make a ritual work.
The most destructive thing one can do in a ritual is to become a
passive observer, thinking that your physical presence is enough. In
ritual passivity results in a significant and sometimes dangerous
draining of energy. Yet it is frequently seen in community ritual,
and it is the issue from which conflict most frequently and
predictably arises. When passive participants are reminded that they
are not being productive, their usual response is to take offense.
I must reiterate the idea that conducting ritual begins by being
acquainted with symbolic objects and gestures. If the psyche cannot
be educated to embrace symbolism, people will have difficulty
understanding and appreciating rituals. Ritual transcends language
and enables us to communicate and interact with the Other World. It
is important when conducting ritual that people move out of literal
and dwell as long as possible on the metaphoric and symbolic regions
of human experience. This is where the soul and spirit reside. This
is the place where people abandon argument and when superficiality
does not intrude. In the world of metaphor and symbol, a simple song
and a little rhythm produce far greater results than a panel
discussion by articulate experts. Here one experiences true
collaboration and learns how to give the attention that all people,
all spirits, and all ancestors need.
# Chapter 10: Fire Rituals
We begin with rituals of fire, because fire is the first element in
the Dagara cosmic wheel. Fire is the element that keeps people
connected to their purpose and to the world of Spirit.
However, it is extremely dangerous to suggest a fire ritual to people
in the West, because Western society's essential characteristic is
fire, and Westerners therefore need to understand the power of fire
more than they need to perform rituals of fire. Positive fire, as we
saw in the earlier chapter, emerges as vision, dream, and intimacy
with the ancestors. Negative fire is speed, restlessness, radical
consumption, and eventually death. Because the attributes of fire in
the West are predominantly negative, people need to attend to that
which can stabilize their fire before they move on to exploring fire
as the warmth of being, creativity, and life. Therefore, before most
Westerners interest themselves in fire rituals, it is crucial that
they make their peace with water.
Fire is the rising force that makes us do, see, feel, love, and hate.
The inner fire is a rope that connects us to the world we abandoned
when we were born into a human body.
A fire ritual is a place where things that interfere with our
connection with our soul's purpose can be surrendered and where fire
can serve as a point of focus.
# Chapter 11: Water Rituals
... water ritual is an attempt to unite things that must be united,
to reconcile things that are meant to be together in the interest of
community. Water rituals tie up loose ends. These loose ends are
obstacles to our balance and reconciliation, our peace and serenity.
Until grief is restored in the West as the starting place where the
modern man and woman might find peace, the culture will continue to
abuse and ignore the power of water, and in turn will be fascinated
with fire. Grief must be approached as a release of the tension
created by separation and disconnection from someone or something
that matters.
To villagers it looks as if the West is uncomfortable with tears
because one cannot argue verbally, logically, against this kind of
emotion. Villagers also believe that Westerners are afraid of
emotion because they are afraid of loss of control. Emotions have
the tendency to spread from person to person, and therefore social
control, to the Western mind, is being risked with any display of
emotion.
The end of the domination of one's life by such emotions requires an
outpouring of liquid. You cannot truly grieve within and remain
composed without.
In order to do a water ritual effectively, one needs a community.
There are few personal water rituals, as the Dagara people don't
comprehend the idea of private grief. Grief is a community problem...
It is sometimes useful for them to get together in small groups of
eight to twelve people to tell one another what causes them grief.
This is because grief does not necessarily come on demand. It is
something that must be evoked through stories and images.
It is not permitted to cultivate solemnity in the village, because
solemnity encourages withdrawal and suspends participation. The
village is a place where energy must flow, and stillness opposes that
flow.
A final and even simpler ritual involves simply maintaining a bowl of
water someplace where you spend time, such as on an altar, in the
house, or at an office. Placing a bowl of water in a room where a
difficult discussion or meeting is to take place can have a
remarkable effect on the tone of the interaction. The mere presence
of water near us is calming and reminds us of the peace and
reconciliation we desire in all aspects of our lives.
# Chapter 12: Earth Rituals
Earth rituals greatly emphasize the sense of belonging, self-worth,
and community, including all forms of relationships. They serve as
an opportunity for a group of people to demonstrate their ability to
give attention, love, and appreciation, and caring to an individual
who needs it badly. This is how certain psychological illnesses are
healed.
One aspect of earth ritual that people in the West are clearly in
need of involves touching. Human hands carry a huge amount of
healing energy, provided one is aware of the kind of mental alignment
that must accompany their touch. ... The lack of touch is the
greatest source of grief in modern culture. Poor self-esteem and the
shrinking of a personal sense of identity can be traced, in part, to
the lack of touch.
It is not possible to engage in a productive earth ritual without
proper touch. Earth is the archetypal symbol of giving. Indeed, the
earth teaches us that touching must take the place of taking, or the
modern world will continue to destroy itself by devouring everything
that is consumable.
# Chapter 13: Mineral Rituals
Mineral rituals aim at restoring lost memories. One of the key
memories that mineral rituals evoke is the life purpose linked to
each human being.
Everyone is gifted. This means that everyone has something to give.
Sometimes we are the last people to recognize our own gifts.
So many people in the modern world, caught between their commitment
to survival and their intuitive allegiance to a genuine life purpose,
find themselves forced to sacrifice their purpose to make a living.
It is for these people that mineral rituals must be done. Their very
livelihood undermines their reason for being. There is no greater
harm done to a person than the harm of a life activity that competes
against, or contradicts, their purpose.
To the indigenous, healing has a lot to do with knowing where you are
in your life journey. ... Behind these tales, wrestling for a place
to live, are countless memories that have been frozen in the cells of
people's bones. This is why every mineral ritual must include a
period of listening, for listening is the complement of storytelling.
To further the awakening begun by attraction to a symbolic object,
frame your attraction in a series of ritual dialogues in which you
speak to the things you are attracted to. In the dialogue, it is
important to speak to the object as though it is animated by a spirit
and is alive, not as tough it is simply a symbolic representation of
something in the distance.
Then, as you engage in dialogue with the object, describe to it as
clearly as possible the feelings and images that arise in you as you
associate with the object. ... The attraction is an invitation to
respond, whether or not one knows exactly how to proceed. The simple
act of having heard the call is enough.
The elders say that the rocks can speak, but their voice is so tiny
that it can barely be heard. The rocks remind us to be still and to
listen carefully, to stop searching outside of ourselves for that
which we already hold within.
# Chapter 14: Nature Rituals
Human beings are most of the time unaware of the extent and intimacy
of their connection with nature, especially the world of plants and
animals.
It is hard to separate nature rituals from water, fire, earth, and
mineral rituals. Since every ritual is an attempt to change our
relationship with the Other World, and since nature is all about
change and transformation, there is some sense in which every ritual
pertains to nature and aims to reveal, heal, and reinstate our own
innermost nature.
Nature rituals, like mineral rituals, help people remain focused on
their true purpose.
Indeed, while it is possible to do a ritual in an amphitheater or in
a hotel ballroom, this same ritual will generate greater energy if
done in the woods. In the modern world, as in the indigenous world,
ritual is best done out-of-doors, surrounded by the elements of the
natural world.
The indigenous believe that healing comes in giving more than in
getting. So in order to remain energetically healthy, and to reduce
the danger of loss, individual as well as collective lives are
punctuated by periodic sacrifices, gift giving to Spirit, and
countless giveaways. This conviction has given rise to the invention
of an enormous number of rituals that are meant to bring something to
oneself, and each of these begins by giving something meaningful away.
In the West, when nature is neglected, people often wear masks in
order to survive. The mask may be a professional role; it sometimes
comes with a suit or uniform and is a refuge, a place of anonymity.
Those who don't wear a mask in their culture risk being hurt, and
thus many are driven to find one. The problem is that as people hide
behind these masks, they become defined by them and unable to tell
the difference between what is natural and what is not. Sometimes
they become so profoundly disconnected from their true self that they
think that their mask is their true nature.
Nature rituals aimed at unmasking the true self need to begin by
addressing the theme of change. The goal is to allow people to
relax, which will allow people to let go of their masks and to find
how it feels to be without a mask for a moment. Healing begins when
the mask is released from the self, for people can't transform when
they are hiding behind them.
An indigenous person can easily identify the mask someone carries by
watching that person dance or play a drum. Music and dance are
diagnostic tools that bring out of hiding parts of the body that are
masked...
Actual mask-making rituals are another way to unmask the self.
[Reminds me of a story i heard about Joana Macy's workshop The Work
That Reconnects.]
# Chapter 15: Initiation: A Response to Challenges of the West
Rites of initiation are aimed at including the young person in the
community and recognizing her or his genius, and moving the youth
toward maturity and adult responsibility. Through initiation, a
young person gains access to dynamic and purposeful living. While
initiation as it takes place in African indigenous culture would not
be appropriate in the West, since we are by definition located in a
different place and culture, some aspects of initiation would, I
believe, speak to particular challenges that Western societies are
facing at this time.
Initiation focuses on and is responding to some basic existential
questions faced by human beings since the dawn of time. Everyone
wonders, Who am I? Where do I come from? What am I here for? Where
am I going?
But troubles do not befall individuals because of their failure to
avoid them. Rather they are milestones of one's journey toward
maturity and responsibility. Their aim is to help people better
understand what life is, and who we are. They are a necessary
ingredient in the removal of whatever stands between us and our
essential self. It is as if there is a natural pull toward
challenges and ordeal in the interest of gaining inner strength and
living a responsible life. Hardship and ordeal therefore initiate a
change from within. One emerges from them with a profound sense of
having undergone a real education. Those who understand this may
even come to welcome adversity.
Every bump in a person's life is an opportunity to grow and change.
Thus, it is not enough to simply regard problems as unfortunate
events. One must deliberately attempt to see the potential for
growth inside trouble.
Because initiation experiences are part of every life, the immediate
issue for Westerners is perhaps not initiation itself but how one may
bring closure to initiatory pain and suffering. People who want to
be recognized as survivors are attempting to seal off an initiatory
experience so that they can get on with something else, because when
suffering is met with recognition, it passes. It is the absence of
radical and genuine recognition and acknowledgment that makes
suffering grow larger.
There is an endless series of unresolved initiations in the modern
world due to isolationism and the personalization of trouble. In
addition, there is a tendency for many to ostracize people who seek
to have their suffering acknowledged.
Community is key to closing initiation.
The absence of a community to recognize and end suffering is also
visible in Westerners' prolonged grief over their parents'
inadequacies. On numerous occasions I have seen men and women in
their 30's and 40's still grieving that their mothers and fathers
weren't there for them the way they should have been, that they had
abandoned them. This crisis in midlife is the result of the person's
sense of anonymity and lack of belonging. Indeed, it is important
for these people to recognize that their parents were not experts at
rearing children. But to hang onto this for many years is
symptomatic of a spiritual paralysis. It reveals the isolation of
individuals and families from a wider sense of community. When
children are raised by a whole village, they do not grow up expecting
their biological parents to provide for all their emotional needs.
Attributing blame to someone else can never bring closure to a
problem. On the contrary it keeps it alive, near enough to affect us
deeply but just too far out of reach for us to solve.
If we begin by accepting the possibility that problems occur because
we make them occur--that hardships such as broken relationships, loss
of a job, financial troubles, and even sickness come because we need
them for our own good--then many healing opportunities become
available. The question of why I would have invited such a hardship
is a good place to begin the journey through initiation. The issue
is not how to get out of the hardship as quickly as possible, but how
to read the message of change embedded within the hardship. Trouble
means that the psyche must move on.
Three stages of initiation:
* [beginning] -- The trouble or ordeal has just started
* [middle] -- A period of extreme disruption
* [end] -- The end is in view, but it is as hard to reach as the
disruption was to endure.
Wherever one fits in these three stages of initiatory journeys, the
key is to escape isolation.
# Chapter 16: Maintaining Community Through Ritual
Any community that begins with a mission statement and a set of
bylaws, any group that believes that it has an identity and purpose
before it has ever even asked anyone to join, will fall short of
serving the true needs of each of its individuals. Any group that
demands that its members follow a pre-existing set of rules and
bylaws can therefore never be a true community. The character of any
true community can be seen only when each of its members has been
awakened fully and allowed to reveal her or his innate gifts and
genuine self. The sum of all these unique identities then becomes
the character and identity of the community. A healthy community not
only supports diversity, it requires diversity.
In the West people usually translate the problem into some type of
either/or duality, where someone is right and someone [else] is
wrong, someone is a winner and someone [else] is a loser. Conflict
becomes an opportunity for instant polarization. Wherever polarity
exists, there is a state of competitiveness that does not serve to
meet the needs in a community, since it tends to separate rather than
unite.
Indigenous societies conceded the existence of conflict but view it
as something of importance and of interest to the community. The
conflict is some sort of message to the entire community--but
expressed through the individuals embroiled in the conflict.
Conflict becomes an occasion for people to enter into a ritual
intimacy. Real friction is aimed at deepening the communal sense.
There are dire consequences in an indigenous society when problems
that are intended for a collective solution are held personal and
private. When an individual nurtures a problem... that person
carries the family conflict out into the community, where he or she
is likely to continue the conflict with others.
The indigenous alternative offers an opportunity. In it
accountability means something like a deepening of the connection
with the thing or person you wronged. If you cause harm to someone,
accountability means doing something that brings you close to the
person on a regular basis for as long as you live.
I am deliberately trying to stress here the necessity of ritualizing
conflict. It is acceptable and proper for individuals to have
conflicts with others, as long as their arguments are voiced within a
space that is considered sacred. This space in a village culture is
maintained by an elder who mediates.
The Dagara creation story says that the planet we are on is a frozen
extension of a much brighter and more harmonious spiritual world. If
we don't maintain this world, something [bad] will happen to the
Other World. Our relationship with the Spirit World is a two-way
stream, and we need to fine-tune and maintain the lines of
communication between the two worlds. The wisdom of the Spirit World
offers us guidance, understanding, and healing. Our purpose in this
world is linked to a job that returns critical material into the
spiritual world. ... this is why when we come here we are not at
peace until we find ourselves useful, wanted, and needed. We do not
come to this world on vacation. We come here for service, and we
have to remember what service is.
author: Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1956-
(HTM) detail: https://malidoma.com/
LOC: BL2480.D3 S65
tags: book,non-fiction,ritual,spirit
title: The Healing Wisdom of Africa
# Tags
(DIR) book
(DIR) non-fiction
(DIR) ritual
(DIR) spirit