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It’s Friday, July 29th, which means it’s the second-to-last day of Sun Dance at Sa’atoy Reservation. Folks are getting happy–but I’ve got to back it up to Thursday, because yesterday was the make-or-break day.
The second day of the Sun Dance, from my perspective, is Hump Day. It’s the day where my body is telling me how tired I am of being in 100-degree weather with no water. I’m wearing accumulated dirt from two or three days and acne is starting to appear. There is an odor that can’t be washed away with moist towlettes. And I’m not sure I really want to be here. The personality is in the house.
The Little Engine That Could–Maybe
Hump Day is always the hardest because you want to believe you can complete the ceremony, but your body might be telling a different story. It’s not physical exhaustion, it’s an emotional one. You’re deep in your own prayers and also you’re “hearing” and being with the prayers of the other dancers. All your pain and fears meet you in the sweat lodge and at the arbor, and you can hear and feel the cacophony of the group. It’s a lot to waft through you. Everything you want for this universe, for your children, for your people is weighing in your heart. Is the Creator hearing the cries of your soul? Is it all in vain?
The Heyoka (I miss Crazy Bull, RIP) comes into the middle of the arbor while we dance with a can of something to drink and pours it in front of our feet–mocking our thirst. Or he eats watermelon in your face. Maybe he pours a bucket of water over your head. (We all like the relief that brings from the heat, but of course he doesn’t choose you.) You try not to engage him, but he wins every time.
In the arbor, where we rest, men and women are separated. We talk to each other and share a rock to put in our mouths to bring back the feeling of wet. Joking re-emerges to lift our spirits, but even at rest in the arbor between dance rounds, you’re still in prayer. Some of your kin are wearing down, becoming irritable and getting snappy. They are thirsty. Drama is going to happen. You’ve been separated from your friends and family for two-and-a-half days, and you need their support. Human will is no good here. You need to be reminded that you are needed and loved and on the right track.
While others rest you walk out to the tree, touching it in prayer. You hold back your tears, or maybe you let them flow, and you pray for a cosmic strength that melts you into the surrender that this day calls for. You don’t belong to you anymore. You belong to the ceremony, to this universe, to the Creator, to all people and all life. You’re the little engine that could.
It’s raining up in Gallup. While rain can feel good on a hot day, it makes your legs and feet work much harder. You know you have to let go, and as Californian as it may sound, you have to be one with the rain or you will suffer.
By nightfall, you are so weary that compassion fills in the gaps your ego used to occupy and sleep takes over. This is a good thing, because while you sleep all the Sun Dance medicine, the celestial wisdom of the star nation and the song of the universe, rewrites the story of who you thought you were and you don’t even know it–yet.
99+3/4 There
Friday comes and you know you’re almost home. Laughter is heard again among the dancers. We start talking about what we’re going to drink or eat when we’re done. We are nearly always admonished for this, but it’s too much fun to share the fantasy. We enter a state of Joy. Our elders, John Funmaker, Pablo Lopez, George Martin and Andrea Lopez, are gentle with us in our fragile state of evolution. They guide us into the second half of the dance. The men are piercing today. The women are making flesh offerings and so are the supporters (thank you).
On this third day we’re pliable, more at peace, and while little fires of drama might be bursting around us for those who have not relinquished themselves, no one pays much attention. It’s all part of the ceremony. You are where you are. You experience what you will. It’s all valid.
Day three glides by … you aren’t doing anything any more. You know who you are because you are the collective.
One Mind. One Voice. One Planet.
On a small but loving reservation in Gallup, New Mexico, my family is gathering to kick up some dirt, dance around a tree and lay down some prayers to answer the prayers of many.
Tree day was this past Tuesday. It signals the beginning of an evolutionary process some call the continuum. In the continuum, events don’t occur in a linear fashion–you’re young, then you’re old, there is today and then tomorrow–everything is happening simultaneously. Maybe we have to separate those experiences out, so as to not get overwhelmed. Humans created time to segment. But I believe the soul craves something more unifying and cozy.
Tree Day
is the day when the sacred forms a circle around people, calling us into communion. A tree must be found. We must hear the tree calling. Piling into cars and trucks, we head to the gathering of the tall ones. The forest.
Until the moment we enter the forest to select a cotton tree, there is joking and laughter and a lot of water drinking. As we stand on the edge of the elders’ gathering (the forest), reverence takes the lead. Quietly we enter. The drummers begin drumming and the songs are sung. The wise ones convene, converse, look, search and stop at the tree that has given itself to the ceremony.
I love Tree Day because people are filing in from all parts of the world. Some are folks I’ve not seen for a long time; relationships are reforged and love flows. So much joking and hugging and pretending like we’re going to be okay without food and water for four days. We’re in it together. Except, again, this year I’m not there. I’m here blogging on it. My heart misses them, and the ceremony, and so it goes. I write so I can belong.
When the tree is erected, you are confronted by the majestic. It is the living example of Namaste (the God in me sees the God in you). Prayer ties are wrapped from the middle of the trunk to the branches. Eagle feathers sway from the tree, indicating future events. Everyone gets excited; you know, that feeling of being on the precipice of the unknown. The context may be the same, but what occurs is always different.
Night falls and everyone hustles to fashion their crowns, wrist and ankle bracelets from newly picked California sage. Pipes are cleaned for the next day. Everyone gets whatever food and liquid they want to be their last for four days.
Headlights blind you as more cars creep onto the Rez. It’s time to go to bed, to get a little sleep if you can before they wake you. Women are squeezing into the teepee, making space for each other, and the men settle in the open-air arbor. You can always hear the petering of laughter from the teepee and the arbor as the quiet takes over.
The tone is getting serious.
Contentment.
The Fire Keeper has lit the fire and it will stay lit until it’s time to head home.
Tomorrow comes very quickly. Already a prayer has been answered.
Aho,
Melanie
It was later in life when I realized how much beauty meant to me. In my twenties, I helped open the Saks Fifth Avenue store in San Francisco’s Union Square. The store was abuzz with celebrities and parties; glorious fun. Amidst all that hubbub, what working with fashion really gave me was a love affair with life. Later, when I worked for Hermes and saw how Bea, trained in France, could hand-sew leather purses, I was a goner. Her leather tools became extension of her love of leather, and of beauty.
My jobs in high fashion were door-openers to a sensory-based experience of beauty that changed how I saw the world. Being surrounded by the immense creativity that these designers had to express was a catalyst for unlocking my own critical need to be self-expressed. It cultivated my shoe and clothing fetish too, for which I make no apologies. (I eagerly share stories, photos and brand knowledge.) The touch of a fabric is still a deeply sensual experience that titillates me to no end.
Embracing beauty with my eyes inserted a kinesthetic resonance that began to show itself beyond the clothing rack. To be that fully alive gave way to the wonder and treasure hunting I continue now.
Beauty’s gravitational pull is calling us all, be it in nature, a great conversation, a deep thinking speaker (like cosmologist Brian Swimme, a poetic cosmologist), a long kiss after a storm with your lover or watching the enthusiasm of sweat drip off a spin-mate as she sings aloud to Bob Marley. Your own beauty surfaces as you laugh and spit at the same time. Your beauty shows in the candor of your courage. Be a witness to your beauty (Can I get a witness?) and for goodness sake, see it in others.
Beauty makes my heart skip a beat. I can’t wait to engage with it one more time, to behold it, to find it in unexpected places and maybe, just maybe, to become it.
Beauty asks something of us: to surrender to our own malleableness. To know ourselves as evolutionary beings capable of reconfiguring ourselves as we expand and stretch. Isn’t that the coolest? Beauty is always seeking us out--hoping for adoption.
Beauty is the understudy of love. Our wise elders teach us how to absorb it. Beauty will find you; once found, it pours itself into you, making you a succulent bucket of gooey love.
And you know goo, it gets on everything.
Brown sugar love,
Melanie
p.s. Don't google for images of beauty. It's incredibly disappointing.
Being a leader for the Coaches Training Institute (CTI) was an incredible path that kept me in a state of transformation. There were those gloriously fun moments when you got to co-lead with a leader you adored.
Such was the moment for myself and Helen House in 2004, co-leading in Englewood Federal Prison. I was secretly confronting my illogical fear of being jailed while I taught, which raised my stress level considerably. Helen was being her brilliant self. I adored Helen. She has a combination of fierce courage and deep vulnerability that is as inspiring as it is sexy cool. Here we are, in front of 25 men who aren’t allowed to feel, teaching and crying as we felt their pain.
Helen was the lead, as she had been with these men before. The moment she walked into the room, they all shouted “Got your toilet paper for your tears, Helen?” She pulled out a roll from her purse and they broke out in laughter. Clearly they loved her as I did. Her compassion, her tears had reached them.
Somewhere during the training we became locked in a battle around how we delivered the curriculum. I was entering the work fresh from a training where the owners had been clear about not changing the curriculum to meet the needs of the participant. “Keep the integrity” was my mantra. Helen hadn’t attended that meeting and I was adamant that she was doing it contrary to the owners’ desires.
Helen was clear that she was doing it exactly as the curriculum required and in keeping with integrity of it. After exhausting days of leading in an intense environment, I sat trying to convince her to shift her teaching. We agreed that we were more dedicated to each other than to the misunderstanding. Love ruled. Weeks after the event, we tried to talk it out. Frustrated and exhausted, we called in a neutral party, Elaine Jaynes, to facilitate.
Within 10 minutes, Elaine had us pegged. After listening to each of us, Elaine asked one question and it was all over. All the miscommunication was dissolved by each of our answers. We giggled and laughed at our silliness and virtually fell into each other’s arms. The question? Elaine asked, “What does integrity mean to you?” One word; multiple definitions.
I bow to Helen for teaching me to put our love first and for staying with me in eye of the storm and not letting go of what mattered most. I bow to Elaine for teaching me that being understood undermined seeking to understand. (Did I mention that as a coach, listening is the first skill we learn?)
I wondered how often I used words to imprison others or myself. There is value in shutting up, in stepping out from behind the words to hear what is trying to be expressed. I’m a talker; shutting up isn’t natural for me. I’m also a student of love, which asks me to listen into the soul of another. Beyond the words and the definition of those words lies an opportunity. Helen, my friend, my colleague, my teacher and my sister–I thank you. Elaine, you’re scary good.
xo
Melanie
In North America, we are about to celebrate Independence Day, a glorious holiday. Being American stands not only for independence as a nation but also for personal independence, or individualism. We’re very proud of our individualism and the outcomes of that, such as competition, self-reliance, pulling oneself up by the boot straps and so forth.
Somehow, though, it feels as though we’ve lost our sense of interdependence in honor of being that individual. In the coaching world, we’re about transformation, emotional awareness, consciousness and relationships. Everything we ever need to learn about ourselves happens in relationships, doesn’t it? Yet I notice that we seem to struggle with asking for help, with showing our vulnerabilities (because somehow that is seen as weak), with admitting our mistakes, and with accepting that we need one another in order to truly grow. It used to take all of us to survive, in the Wild West. It still does–but it doesn’t feel like it anymore, because we have our homes, our cars and jobs, and we are fooled into feeling self-sufficient.
And I guess we are self-sufficient, but at what cost to our sense of humanity, our collective beingness? Are we truly happy being so self-sufficient? Could we, as a nation that influences so many other nations, be stuck in a country-wide adolescent phase of “me,” or “the individual?”
Could there be an elder wisdom from other nations that models unity and wholeness? Can we pursue our individual identity without forsaking the collective wisdom?
While we are out celebrating the birth of our nation, here’s my thought for today: There is glory, and beauty and peace, in being held together by each other. Lean in.
OX MelanieIf you’re into
Consciousness + Love @Work + Human Potential + Rule Breaking + Stirring Up Trouble + Belly Laughter + Rockin’ your Soul Identity + Making Some Dough…. then come visit me @ www.soulpurposecoaching.com. I’ve remodeled the joint.
It’s A New Day, Baby!
Remember the song from wil.i.am, “It’s a New Day” – the declaration that something very big is happening and transformation is imminent? That’s how life has felt for me since the beginning of 2011.
Many of you know that two-and-a-half years ago my mother died. As someone told me, We are only visitors for a short stay. I had no idea how profound sorrow would come for me at the end of her stay. I lived in this fog that kept me moving in slow motion and yet I didn’t know I was in a fog at all. Nothing I did gained traction. I wasn’t unhappy but I wasn’t my joyous self either.
In December of 2010 I felt that something stir. I could begin to see again; it was like someone had given me the best pair of glasses in the Universe. The sorrow of losing a parent will always be part of who I am, but that goshdarn sorrow in all that fog was busy rearranging my cosmology to help me live in a Universe in which I thrived.
Hallelujah!
Love, I’ve got traction, baby I’ve got wings, new ideas, services, products, friends. I’ve got you, babe. (ha!). Please accept this blog as invitation to roam around my new website. Check out my new baby, Soul Identity Branding. I am so darn proud and excited to introduce this cool, sexy and relevant technology that will totally rock your world. If you get as excited as the folks who have done these sessions with me, give me a ring @ 650-346-3581 and let’s do a Strategy Session. For those who respond to this blog, I’m taking 20% off the price until June 15th.
I’ll be updating regularly, talking about consciousness and love–you know my deal. I’ll probably be kicking some butt along the way too. I hope to hear from you @ soulpurposecoaching@pacbell.net. Until next week….
Big love,
Melanie
Here’s what Veronica had to say about her Soul Identity Branding session:
“Melanie’s process for Soul Identity Branding rocks! She is the soul whisperer, intuitively pulling out the words that powerfully describe your soul essence, making your life’s work ring with joy and feel more like YOU. A single call with her got my engines running and my heart throbbing with a new sense of my work. If you want to powerfully capture the heart and soul of your life’s work, work with Melanie now.”
Veronica Conway, Giving leaders their super powers
Take a peek!