Dancing Among The Rocks Of Ages

A Journey toward Renewal

By Parashakti and Rabbi Miriyam Glazer

Samantha Hahn

With this issue, we are delighted to be inaugurating our new jointly written and conceived column, one that explores and integrates our shared passion for a spirituality that is at once earthy and soaring, affirming of the truths within us and socially engaged. We draw on our shared love for our Jewish identity and our celebration of the many rich spiritual traditions upon which we humbly and joyously also draw. And we draw on our panoply of experiences as spiritual leaders – Parashakti in her mission of exploring the essence of Spirit through Ritual and Dance ceremonies and Rabbi Miriyam as teacher, translator, retreat leader, writer.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

So many of the world’s spiritual traditions intricately, profoundly, engage the experience of being born and seek, in such a vast variety of ways, to probe its meaning. At the heart of Christianity, for example, is the belief that to embrace Jesus as one’s personal savior is to be “born again,” and just as we float suspended in water in the womb, so the Christian marks that rebirth experience through baptism in water. For the “mother-faith,” Judaism, Israel itself came into being through an experience of collective birth: the people were leaving the “narrow place” (Mitzrayim); the “waters parted,” and the people came through the channel into their new world. To this day, participating in mikveh, the prayerful dipping into the “living waters” of the ritual bath, is important to many Jews for its power to evoke profound spiritual renewal, spiritual rebirth.

For Native Americans, the possibility of spiritual rebirth is expressed through the powerful ceremony of the Inipi, or sweat lodge, designed to purify one’s body, mind and soul and to renew the very core of one’s being. The Inipi takes place within a dome-shaped structure built out of willow saplings, for in the Seneca tradition the willow is the Tree of Love. Every element of the structure is rich with meaning.

At its center is a circular pit. The fact that it is circular is important: it symbolizes the circle of life, the medicine wheel, home of the stones. And how powerful a symbol stone can be! Just as the psalmist of the Jewish tradition evokes the divine creator of the universe as an everlasting “Rock,” so in Native American spiritual tradition the stones at the heart of the sweat lodge serve as vivid, silent witnesses to the vastness of time, the tumultuous changes on the planet earth and in the universe as a whole. To enter the lodge is to enter the womb of the Earth Mother, to take one’s place around the “universal center,” the Great Mystery at the heart of life.

Recently, Parashakti had the honor of co-leading an Inipi ceremony at Menla Retreat Center for participants who had just spent a weekend practicing Jivamukti Yoga with Sharon Gannon, David Life and Dechen Thurman. To guide their entrance into the lodge, into the body of the Earth Mother, we saged the participants and sang songs of welcome, songs that honored our ancestors, our family, our friends, all living beings and the earth itself. Sitting in the darkness, we prayed and chanted four rounds. As water was poured on the hot stones, creating steam and intensely heating the lodge, each of our rounds, for each of the directions, was focused on an intention for healing an aspect of the soul.

In Native American tradition, the stones are the record-keepers of the earth embodying ancient lessons. During the ceremony, Parashakti, personally, experienced the hot stones as symbols of eternity, symbols of the vastness of the universe – the geological layers of time, the comets that flash through our solar system, the great stony galaxies, planets and moons coursing through our universe. And so we believe they truly are: take a stone in your care, and you possess a vast and ancient history of the universe and the planet earth, its periods of heat and its periods of cold, the complex minerals that, dance together to become one, secrets of the earth’s movements.

If stones are like eternity, water, the other essential ingredient of the sweat lodge ceremony, is a symbol of the origins of life itself. We float, after all, in amniotic fluid – salt water — before we are born into this world (we even announce a birth-to-be very often by saying “her water broke!”). Water is changeable, ever-moving, ever-flowing, just like the energy of life itself. Most of who we are is water – in the same proportion, magnificently, as the planet on which we live.

With Parashakti’s guidance, each of the participants was of course having a uniquely individual experience, awakening to a unique set of associations, for those stones and water and steam. For us, the images of stone and water together awaken powerful associations with the city of Yerushalayim, Jerusalem, where Parashakti was born and Rabbi Miriyam lived. The city itself is all built of the stone that is mined from its hills. But while the actual city today — what is called Yerushalayim shel ma’tah — mundane Jerusalem — might be driven with conflict, Yerushalayim shel ma’alah — spiritual Jerusalem — is powerfully evocative in ways that, for us, are reminiscent of the sweat lodge. It too exists both as physical reality and as spiritual symbol. And just as entering the domed sweat lodge re-enacts entering the womb of the earth, so Jewish mystical tradition believes, at the very center of the center of spiritual Jerusalem is the beating heart of the whole world, and it is there that the “Stone of the Foundation” seals off the waters of the hidden sea, the Primal Abyss that existed before creation itself. If the stone is dislodged, say the mystics, the whole world would cease to be. Water and stone, stone and water: powerful opposites that create a new reality together....

In Native American tradition, the heated rocks in the fire outside the Inipi are the “Grandfathers,” and in the process of mapping the Soul, the door of the Inipi opened to invite the Grandfathers in. The door to the lodge once again closed and the pouring of water on the stones continued to create steam, intensifying our prayers in the absolute darkness of the lodge. Slowly, along with the outer darkness, came the brilliance of inner illumination, a sense of awakening, of freedom, as participants overcome their fears and let go of self-limiting inner issues. The energy built as we prayed together for peace, transformation, renewal and service, and discovered the truth that, in praying for others, you are also praying for yourself.

The energy built as the whole group entered the last round, to evoke a sense of responsibility and of wisdom; each participant was asked to identify a commitment they are taking upon themselves as they leave the sweat lodge. Parashakti guided the participants in a time of Silence, freeing each one to enter into their own souls and discover the nature of their own visual quest. At the same time, because we are the carriers, and thus the source of life, for the dreams of our ancestors, the silence created a pathway to silently hear and feel our ancestors celebrating their presence among us.

In her Spirit, Parashakti found herself dancing around the fire with them; time seemed to stand still, crystallized into the essential, simple elements of being and of nature – water, stone, fire – and she felt herself suffused with feelings of unconditional love and healing.

How free her rejoicing spirit felt! And so, with grace, intensity, and love, those who shared the Inipi that day, served as one another’s witnesses. With a gentle sense of spiritual humility, they crawled out of the sweat lodge renewed, feeling within the vivid, vibrant, energy of creation. And it was with that feeling that Parashakti returned home, and shared with Rabbi Miriyam, as together we share with all of you, that blessed process that fuses stone and water, and that moves from individual silence to a shared sense of community, from the inner dance of a single spirit to the potential of a transformative Dance of Life together.