Snake

Snake - The South

Serpent, you shedder of skins, show us how to shed our past.

The first direction we turn to in elemental yoga ceremony is the south. Serpent energy is the archetype of the south direction, and earth is its element. In yoga tantra, the kundalini serpent coils 3 ½ times around the smoky grey shivaligham representing the etheric body. In the Bible, the serpent means knowledge. In modern medicine, the serpent denotes healing.

The snake coils and slides belly down, heart down on the surface of the earth, absorbing its warmth. I think we used to be more like this. The story of Sita in the Hindu epic tale The Ramayana is a tale of the heart. Sita is born in a farmer’s field, right out of the plowed earth. She marries a king and when she is kidnapped by a demon king, the monkey god Hanuman heroically rescues her. Sita returns to her kingdom a pariah because her subjects assume her to be defiled by demons (because they are misogynists). Escaping, she lives simply in the forest, cultivating medicinal herbs. At the end of her life, she offers her body back to the earth, her refuge.

What do we do when we are out of balance in our bodies, in our communities, as a species and with the natural world? Ancient cultures, who we know kept the planet alive for millennia, for us to enjoy and steward (?!) suggest humility, reverence, and ritual. When we work with earth, we cannot separate ourselves from cultural issues of our time. To me, the deepest cultural issues relate to how we treat the earth and the beings and people most connected to it.

I live on a hill in deeply ancestral Hawaiian land. I have struggled to understand my place here, how to respect the current culture and the land, when my very presence seems a bit insulting to its heirs. My white body suggests oppression and colonization and there is no hiding from that.

For a while, I tried to prove myself as an ally. To whom, I’m not really sure. During Covid, there are not a lot of gatherings. My usual philosophy is: you can’t please everyone, and those who are meant to love and be with you, will love and be with you no matter what. No one even saw my attempts to align with the culture, as I sweated away in a garden, cultivating kalo and turmeric, trimming fruit trees, weeding pineapple patches. I only ate what came from the land. I meditated and slept in a screened-in hut.

I dreamed I was in the midst of clusters of Hawaiian people. I drove onto a flooded road. I was being pulled out to sea in my Subaru. No one helped. In another dream, I moved into a local family’s house. The only exit from my room was a window over their living room couch. I crawled onto it, trying to be quiet, trying not to be in the way. My family came over to swim in the lake behind the house. There wasn’t room for them in the lake. A large woman dressed in orange almost sat down on me. “Go to Malibu,” she said.

I ended up very sick, without the proper diet for my constitution, without windows that could close out the humid jungle air at night. This entire period was exercising a muscle that allows me to align with my own truth, no matter what poignant or very compelling message there is to abandon that to fight someone else’s battles, or sacrifice my ability to be effective in the (sometimes seemingly mundane) ways I can be of service.

The first of the three tenets of earth based medicine can be helpful when you find yourself at odds with your heritage and birth culture. The question of cultural appropriation and privilege has the foundation, ground if you will, of humility.

Humility

Here are some questions to begin: What values have you developed that were not part of your cultural or birth heritage? What values are you carrying forward from your early years or ancestry? Are these in alignment?

The best we can do, probably, is to look at ourselves truthfully, with our pasts and desires and needs. Ask yourself the following:

-          How does my privilege affect others? Is something I am doing hurting someone in a way I can avoid? (Or want to try to avoid?)

-          How can I use my whole background (even the parts I might be ashamed of) to relate to others or the natural world in a way that brings healing?

-          What can the natural world (away from human voices and imprint) teach me about my place in the order of things?)

Human consciousness is constantly evolving and fluctuating. There’s so little actual truth. The earth is pretty constant – rocks, roots, the solidity of bone and the structure beneath your feet or body right now…

Reverence

My neighbors on this hill are recent transplants from San Diego, wealthy brewery owners. The day I moved in, my landlord mentioned that the neighbors were pouring poison into their tree stumps. I was horrified, and sad. Who would move to this beautiful place, where everything is so obviously and delicately interconnected, and introduce poison? When I found out the woman was a yoga teacher, I literally almost imploded. And so my practice began. I have no ability to control this kind of ignorance, I tell myself. “Focus on what you can control,” I inwardly say. Here’s what I can control: I can respect my anger and outrage. I can tenderly hold that part of myself that is powerless to protect the ecosystem where I live. I can allow the grief.

What emerges is reverence. By not spiritually bypassing my experience around this, I am honoring what is true for me and my relationship to the earth that I love.

I am not sending the neighbors love and light. That is not true for me. Ultimately I wish them not to suffer, and honor their hearts and everything. But I am fucking pissed. And that’s just real. By allowing this part of myself, I am honoring the divinity of every-freaking-thing. Even the poison people, doing some good in the world in their own way, even if I can’t see what that is. Or at least, they are not doing as many terrible things as some others. It’s not really my business.

As a meditation teacher I know says, “If you’re not cool with it, that’s ok. Just be cool with that.”

Ritual

We've been out of cooperation with Earth's cycles, which also includes our bodies. When we attune to its balance, and act responsibly in accordance with the laws of the universe, we automatically will sow and reap its infinite abundance. - Starhawk

Where do we bring our rage and grief, our self-doubt and trauma? What container has our culture created for such things? Talk therapy is a way to work with the mind. There are some good modalities for the body-mind, like somatic based therapies. As they say in Qoya, though, a sincere ritual can be worth months of therapy.

Why is this? And why have cultures throughout time created containers of ritual for its communities? In Tibetan meditation, you visualize a mandala. Why do you do this? It gives the psyche an organizing principle to re-orient around.

When you use your body prayerfully, with intent, your earth element is involved. When you breathe fully, your energy is engaged through the air element. When you focus your mind, that is air and fire. And when you emotionally express, your water flows. You return back to the elemental state, washing yourself clean, into wisdom, wildness and freedom.

As you return to the roots, what’s beneath the soil, you can grow your plant-self, beautiful, fruit-bearing, supportive of healthy weather and collective breath. You can offer yourself into the soil of practice, compost, decay, grow yourself as medicine for a broken world.