Cultural Repair and Ceremony
Just recognize that this lineage that you are learning from, it was not taken or stolen. This lineage was a gift that was passed on with the message, “You all need to learn how to do this”.
People that have not been raised with these ceremonies need these traditions because this is how life works. The message from my native teachers has been, “This is how we've lived as human beings on this earth. And this is what we want you to understand so that you can live as a human being on this earth, because we are all, on this earth together. And without you being a human being and us being human beings, there is going to be problems. We all need to be human beings. And this is how we've been able to become and maintain our humanness.”
Wherever you go in this world people historically had a way of using sweat therapy as a form of purification and healing. I know there was European sweat lodges, there was sweat lodges in England, and of course, ancient sweat lodge all over North America. They did not always look the same, but they all had sweat lodges of different sorts. The general principles were all the same and the applications were similar.
So, what we are doing in learning sweat lodge traditions is we are repairing our cultures. Somewhere in the past, the sweat lodge that was available to your ancestors was lost or taken away. It was taken away by another dominating culture or society, or it was abandoned usually in a survival situation. In these survival situations, groups of people on the run grabbed what they could, and they remembered what they could, but they did not put everything in that bundle. They forgot things along the way.
What we are going through with cultural repair is we are looking at what really makes us human beings, in the healthiest way, and how we bring those things back into our lives. Helpers Mentoring Society focuses on an aspect of culture repair – the ceremonies that bring us deep connections to life.
When you connect to something deeper, beyond just what we call nature, you are connecting into the spirit. And in my opinion, in my experience, there is a lot of healing that that this can provide. When this connection is made it can really shift human beings in a very quick way. It is a spiritual healing - it is a shift in consciousness that nature connection on its own does not necessarily access. So, we are repairing culture, but we're, we're bringing back these processes that help expedite the healing of humanity.
