Report from the Earth Day Sweat Lodge

[Star Man]

Report from the Earth Day Sweat Lodge

Sweet Mystery! what a glorious celebration of Earth Day we held in the Great Mystery Lodge of Humanity Rising on Saturday April 22 and Sunday April 23. I have been re-reading Sandra Ingerman's book, “Awakening to the Spirit World,” and re-learning some of her approaches to journeying. Ingerman was a student of Michael Harner's (he wrote “The Way of the Shaman”). Ingerman emphasizes “seeing with the heart” as opposed to merely seeing with the eyes. We brought this skill into the lodge, seeing the Stone People from our hearts as they came in, seeing the plant helpers from our hearts, seeing the hoop and feathers as well. Ingerman also teaches an expansion of the journey. For a long time our journey has focused on the power animals and spirit guides, but Ingerman suggests we can go to our lower world, middle world, or upper world and seek advice from or communicate with any “being” or modality that presents itself. Ingerman counsels journeying with figures that come to us in dreams, for example. Recently the sweat lodge appeared to me in a complex dream. I started off to uncover the meaning of the dream by asking my power animals in a journey. They told me they had nothing to offer and suggested that I ask the lodge itself. I invited the lodge to come into the place where I meet my power animals, and it did come in and gave me a powerful teaching on my dream's meaning. Ingerman's suggestions powerfully affected our experience in Earth Day celebration.

As we were singing the songs that initiate the journey, it occurred to me to suggest a different sort of journey, one influenced by Ingerman's teaching, one in which we invited All Our Relations into the lodge to journey with us. First we invited all the animals we could think of. Oh! The lodge was full. Everyone in the lodge called up an animal, one after another. Elephant. Whale. Coyote. Fox. Lizard. Alligator. They all behaved themselves. We brought in trees: redwood, oak, casurina, persimmon. Every tree and plant we could think of we brought in. We “saw” each of them from our hearts, treasured them, appreciated them. Then we sent them on their way with our blessings. Next we invited in all 7.5 billion human beings on the planet. We named every tribe, every ethnic group, every race we could. Comanche, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Inuit, Aleut, Germans, Irish, Japanese, Koreans, Micronesians, Namibians, Libyans, businessmen, and more and more. In my own journey I took them all to my lower world meeting place where they received instruction from my power animals and the spirit guide who lives there. They were advised to free themselves of the Contagion, the infection of greed, self-absorption, violence, individualism, capitalism, denial, and misogyny, that the Native People call “Wetiko.” The Contagion is causing humans to destroy the planet, raising the temperature, melting the polar ice caps, releasing gigatons of methane to further heat our world, spreading drought and extreme heat waves, raising the sea level, killing the coral. Over many lodges and many years, we have prayed for the earth and all our relations. Now we were attempting to teach the humans in a new way, to reach them directly through the journey.

A great awareness came in to the lodge near the end of our two-day sweat. One of our group received that the lodge itself is much more than the structure where we pray. It is an organism, and we who pray and journey participate in the life of the sweat lodge being. We could “see” the lodge with our hearts, just as we had been “seeing” redwood and whale and elephant and rock and ocean and all the tribes of our species with our hearts. As I had experienced in my own dream-inspired journey, the lodge communicated with us, nurtured us, blessed us, just as a medicine person would do. The meanings of our songs and prayers deepened. Our experience of at-oneness with All Our Relations expanded. We united once again in mystical union with Great Mystery. Aho Mitakuyue Oyasin.

John “Star Eagle” Omaha