Praying, Going Slow, and Being Strong
I am so grateful that I am alive in this time. That I have slowed down enough to hear the call of my ancestors as the conquistadors tried to extinguish their light on battlefields and in bedrooms hundreds of years ago. That although genocide would not permit them to keep carrying the torch of our people, that as they lay there dying, they did not lose hope. Instead they reached out to their descendants and said hear our cry! Pick up this torch when it is safe so that the light of our people may continue to shine onto the world. Learn, cherish and share our stories, our hopes and our dreams. Take care of the Earth our Mother, of all the creatures that dwell upon her and all of our relations. So long as you carry this torch and share its light, we are never truly dead. I am humbled, honored, and grateful to hear their cry. They hoped for a world where it would be safe for me to be a strong Muisca woman. It is my job to seize that hope and bring it into the imperfect world we live in today.
Often when I try to pray, I feel a deep humiliation. A shame that I have not been present sooner. A doubt that maybe I am speaking to no one. A fear that I am unworthy of the love of my Creator. These are hard feelings to face, and mean that I have not prayed in a long time. I don’t feel like I know how to anymore. I need help. This week help arrived in the form of a prayer circle started by a friend of mine. Because of the safety and love of my friends, I was able to conjure the image of simply stepping over these fears and moving towards my Creator despite the fears still being present. My hope is that once we have a loving relationship and are in ongoing conversation with each other, that those fears will be left so far behind me that there just isn’t room for them anymore in my new life.
All my life I have been very hard on myself in many ways. I have always hated my stomach, never giving this beloved body part any room to be in the world. Always looking to suck my belly in, never giving it any room to expand and be great. I have also always moved quickly to outrun or out work my fears so that they wouldn’t catch up with me. Now that the world is telling us all to slow down, and I have been laid off from my restaurant job and have no other paid work to do, I have to slow down. I feel myself being called to serve by helping people make meaning of this moment through water related rituals.
For me, the key to prayer, water ritual, and making meaning are to connect these struggles of my spirit, with my heart and body. Yesterday an online yoga class about the belly popped up in my social media feed (click here for this awesome and free Yoga with Adriene class). I am so grateful that now I have a concrete path back into my body. I am taking the first step of breathing deeply and lovingly into my belly. I am finally giving it the space to expand before I make it contract. I am trying to revel in its beauty in both positions. As soon as this paradigm shift took place in my head, I had a vision of happy and beautifully curvy Native/Indigenous Muisca women in my family line. Smiling at me, at themselves, and just enjoying every inch of their bodies and their lives. What a gift.
For the past decade of my yoga practice, I have fallen into the temptation to go fast even in my yoga classes under the guise that I simply preferred a more ‘athletic,’ ‘vigorous,’ or ‘challenging,’ style. There is something about this COVID 19 filled moment though that is allowing me to approach my practice as a way to slow down in a way that I can actually handle and enjoy. I am still afraid of going slowly, but I am trying to use my yoga practice as a way to cultivate faith that it is safe for me to be strong now. To remember that I am not using my body to run from danger, but rather to connect to the universe, my ancestors, and myself. That I am using my practice to be in line with the slower energy of the earth. That in this COVID 19 moment, I don’t have to fight capitalism in order to plant a stake in the ground for my own peace of mind and the peace that I wish to send out to others. COVID 19 has done that for me because the world has slowed down its frantic pace. I no longer have to stand my ground against the stream. I get to be lulled along simply and quietly by the slow flow of the water and listen to the slow rhythms of the earth and the animals.
Just as a flower reaches towards the sun and grows slowly inch by inch, so too can I reach slowly for my Creator and grow my faith, inch by courageous inch.