What Ceremony Provides for Personal, Community and Cultural Repair (Healing-Reconnection)
At the heart of all that the Helpers Mentoring Society offers is a unique, powerful, and ancient body of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom on how to connect and heal. Many who hear the teachings observe that it speaks to something profound and universal within them. This wisdom has come from multiple generations of interaction with creation, seeking life. Human beings are not born knowing how to live; we must learn, which is part of the human experience. The modern understanding of life is deeply flawed as it has lost the previous generation's wisdom through conflict and colonization. The wisdom of living in health, happiness, and connection to life is sought through asking the unseen for guidance. What often returns as an answer is ceremony and song. Within these ceremonial processes are maps of how to live. These maps are simple yet hold a universal wisdom that fits within all creation. The ceremonies teach us how to live. If we approach with humility and listen deeply, we can find guidance that can help heal ourselves, our communities, and our cultures into the future.
What is healing – Connection or Re-connection
People condition:
A template that is adaptable to the current conditions of life (shifting baseline theory).
Highly adaptable – lack of species-specific memory (animal instincts) allows for learning to occur after birth (compared to highly developed animals born).
Holds some instinctive awareness of the “idea scene” (can lead to Vision, Gifts, Purpose, and Wounds).
Will learn through pattern observation and mimicry – what are the patterns of family, community, society. Society priorities.
Consciousness will become activated based upon the experiences offered within the conditions of upbringing (what connections are available). More awake or less awake (use the teachings of Kansas for example).
Human Condition:
Has/is developing, actualizing, and transcending self though activation of consciousness via connected experiences to nature, others, spirit, and self. Is more awake.
Qualities of a human being – 7 Sacred Attributes – Wohpe Sakowin Wakan (The 7 Mysterious Qualities of the Law of Creation Expressed in the Human Being) – Peace, Love, Compassion, Vitality, Helpfulness, Healing, Wellness.
The Community Condition:
Community has historically been a physical collection of people in proximity to one another, who hold a mutually beneficial unifying story.
What are the principles and underlying parameters of the collective story? What are the priorities?
One aspect of community is how to raise children to be adapted to the unifying community story = education (indoctrination).
An aspect of community can now also be found via technology. Missing proximity.
Actualized Community:
Ensuring the actualization of every member of the community by providing all base needs are met/addressed/navigated.
Holding a collective story which recognizes the human condition and provides a pathway to the development of human beings.
Education which systematically develops sovereignty for each person as well as reinforces the understanding self-identity is inseparable from interpersonal relativity. (Mitakuye Oyasin).
Highest Expression is Cultural Perpetuity.
Indigenous Culture:
Understanding the human condition and activation/prioritizing connection between people and land, others, self, and spirit.
Knowing that tending nature must be at the center of physical existence.
Supporting the navigation of the challenges of life with spiritual/universal pattern recognition.
Ceremony:
Ceremony is an education/development format which has been passed down from the Creation to people to support the development of human beings – which ensures the continuation of human life.
Each ceremony focuses on various aspects of growth and learning.
Vision Quest – spiritual development/activation (abstractions, symbolism, metaphor, synchronicities, dreams)
Drum/Song – Rhythm, vibration, communication, vitality, complexity, multiperspectivity, multitasking, conduction/conduit/conveyance,
Sweat Lodge – all four aspects of self-growth, realignment, coherence to creative order, creativity, endurance, mental quietness (mindfulness), emotional awareness and expression, spiritual communication.
Sacred Pipe – Unity with creation/nature, holds a collective story and provides points of view beyond human perspective. Develops unity with creative and lineage aspects of mind and heart, builds relationship with life beyond current physical existence.
Ceremony and Indigenous Culture go hand in hand:
One does not fully exist without the other. Society expresses its priorities with developing connections. The story, the experiences it offers, and reinforces is informed by something – the underlying goals.
In indigenous cultures the story of what is priority is held by ceremony. Ceremony is where the sacred stories are shared and experienced again and again by all the participants.
Helpers Mentoring Society
Within culture there are specialized groups who carry specific responsibilities for the maintenance of the culture. Helpers Mentoring Society focuses on educating the group who are called to be connection facilitators and educators. Part of the responsibility is being able to conduct the Advanced Connection Practices, also called ceremony. Ceremony is the place where people can come to learn how to live directly from the Powers of Creation. The role of the ceremonial facilitator is to support this opportunity, to give the experience health context, and to help the new people to learn how to help others. All of this is for the sake of the continuation of life itself.
The Helpers Journey was developed looking at how the foundation of connection occurs, as taught by the lineage ceremonies. The patterns of what creates a connected human being and how one becomes a facilitator of connection practices is what is shared in the Helpers Journey. In the advanced courses students learn the actual ceremonial practices and how to apply them for the growth and development of others.
