Jaguar
Jaguar - the West
Mother, Sister Jaguar, please protect us as we travel into the shadow to unearth its gifts; show us the way beyond death.
About 15 years ago, I learned to call in the archetypes of the four directions in the Q’ero tradition of the Andes. I didn’t begin to associate those archetypes with anything in practical life until I started dancing Qoya (qoya.love). Now, it’s fascinating to see how these ancient archetypes come alive and provide very real and tangible healing.
Tomorrow, New Year’s Day, in Hana, Maui, I will be guiding 27 sun salutations dedicated to the energy of the jaguar. Jaguar medicine is shadow work. Dismemberment is an initiatory process in most earth-based traditions. We know it in modern culture as deprogramming. Our identities become ponderous, heavy with beliefs and ideas from our upbringing and culture. Dislodging these ideas is a very real process in yoga. Thus, the emphasis on death and rebirth. In yoga practice, the main point is to get to savasana and let it all go, rising up reborn in a way.
Sometimes it’s important to look back. Spiritual mantras like “be here now” sometimes confuse us when it comes to the very real process of reviewing where we have been. The irony is that in order to call ourselves fully into the present, there always has to be integration of the past. Sometimes, it’s all one moment. Other times, the mind and energy can feel picked apart, scattered into pieces. It’s all ok.
Once, I was camping in a Balinese pavilion in the jungle behind a well -known Ashtanga yoga teacher’s house (he had instructed Madonna and Sting and, ha, Pavarotti, in his heyday) on a lesser known Hawaiian island, which is a lava rock of myth and legend and deep mana (healing power). This Balinese Pavilion was located at the fork of three dry rivers that once flowed from the looming mountain all the way to the ocean across the next property.
Dry riverbeds snake through the land on all the Hawaiian islands. Water is stolen or re-directed. Sometimes (not often) there is little rainfall. Where the water has been diverted, the memory of water still flows. Cells alive, you can sense this flow and become it, just as if the water was rushing over you, washing you quiet, washing you present and whole. There’s a sense that the water chose this path, that the water knows, and the body you inhabit, composed of water, answers the call to enter the flow.
Anyway, that’s the kind of poetry this island can inspire when you visit in a good way (which is quietly, respectfully, and honoring the lack of tourism and the subsistence lifestyle of the native people). For many days, I didn’t speak to anyone. I found a river valley to visit during each day, and sat or walked near the confluence out of time, with no agenda. I found my mind so busy running over past episodes, mostly from the last three years in Hawaii, and often I didn’t try to divert or force the flow. I didn’t try to meditate or do any kind of practice to control my thoughts.
At the time, I had a very real sense that memory has an innate wisdom. On this island, I began to trust that the psyche knew how to heal itself with minimal intervention. This was a period where I was gifted almost a natural process of soul retrieval (before and after this ten days, I underwent periods of intensive somatic therapy and lots of meditation and yoga practice). This was an unwinding, uncoiling of the psyche, virtually untended.
Where the physical body softens and enters into emotional flow, mental uncoiling, the earth meets water. Entering into physical spaces on the planet that are virtually untouched by human intervention, that have retained a certain power, can instigate natural processes to clean us and re-create a rebirthed self that is more attuned to its true nature. But the psyche is adaptable and the process can happen anywhere. Life is happening for your soul’s remembrance. The process of dismembering old beliefs is always followed by a re-membering, putting the pieces back together in a way that can serve your soul’s growth more gracefully.
It’s probably good to note: the process is not often graceful but the result can be.
Today is the final day of what for many has been an epic year: 2020. Here’s a meditation that you can do anytime (the end of a day or week or month), but could serve you very well today.
Year Review:
Take some minutes to lightly let your psyche review January 2020. What events or moments stand out? What did you face then? Who was with you at these key times? What lessons did you learn? How did you succeed emotionally or spiritually? What qualities can you celebrate in yourself?
Repeat this for each month, grasping only lightly to each surfacing impression and then again letting your awareness drift.
A little self-celebration goes a long way. Lean into this aspect of your year review the most. You are an amazing being who is learning and growing and remembering who you truly are, moment by moment, bit by bit.
Lots of love and blessings for your 2021!