Animá, Spirituality & Religion
Awakening to the Spirit
———–Animá, Spirituality & Religion
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By Jesse Wolf Hardin (www.animacenter.org)
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The winding river canyon where we live is host to many dozens of now primarily indiscernible subterranean pit houses, homes once inhabited by the peoples that archaeologists call the Mogollon, but who knew themselves as the Sweet Medicine People. And near this exact bend where we built the pine board hobbit houses of our teaching center, can be found the remains of the largest kiva in the area. Kivas are the underground chambers dedicated to religious ceremony, and at least once such structure marks those places selected to be the center for group ritual for an entire region. At certain significant times the black tressed natives would have walked from many miles both further up and down the river, gathering to exchange stories, to trade and to flirt, but foremost to attend or actively participate in the ceremonies and prayers that they believed would ensure their people’s well being. Many is the retreat guest or student who has come to us with a tale of having heard the muffled sound of drums or flutes emanating from the cave-pocked cliffs, or heard laughter intermingled with the glug, chortle and bell like ring of the river as it rolls over rocks and plunge pools.
For them as us, all the world would have felt alive. For people living so intimately with the land, everything would have felt personable and energized, endowed by a creator or creative force with a spark of spirit deserving of acknowledgment and respect. The myriad plants springing forth from the unlikely alchemy of seed and soil, the complex creatures that provided humankind with vital lessons and valuable examples as much as they did clothing and food. An energy or spirit vibrating in the volcanic rocks, glowing in the light of a setting sun. Spirit in taste and scent, struggle and fun. Given voice through the river, recorded in the patterns of tree bark, danced in the Fall spiraling of cottonwood leaves. Spirit tracing its own movements, in graceful designs in weed lashed sand, and spirit empowering every giving person’s helpful hand. Spirit in the hopeful child’s face, in the hearts and deeds of they who served love, truth and place. Spirit taking flight in songs, echoing off the kiva’s earthen walls, and emboldening young alders to do the “impossible” by planting determined roots in what is an always unpredictable, shifting shore.
These immanent aspects and qualities of the canyon are no less discernible to the residents and guests arriving today, whenever we quiet the persistent commentary of the mind long enough, and they become too intense to ignore as we begin to reawaken our physical senses, our intuition and ancient dormant instincts. They are, in fact, so vitally present that even the rare distracted visitor who is nearly unconscious of their surroundings, will still sometimes stop in mid sentence to try and gauge what they are feeling, wondering why they are responding emotionally when they intended to keep the conversation constant and superficial, or why they are know beset by repressed memories of unfulfilled needs or unlived hopes, missions or dreams. At the least, nearly everyone experiences the canyon’s sometimes unsettling “enlivenedness,” usually leading to a sense of all things’ interconnectedness and the ultimate unity of their purpose and design.
This is what we call the Anima, the unifying and animating force of creation and proliferation, of adaptation and manifestation, life begetting life. Animá (with the accent over the “a”) is not a religion but an evolving study and practice for living awakened, ultra-aware, purpose driven, choice filled lives… informed by the Anima and all elements of the natural world. For the agnostic or atheist, it can be readily described in the language of new science – from the latest understandings of ecology and psychology to Larry Dossey’s research into the extended mind and Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of “morphic fields” – and for the religiously inclined, it can be explained as the God-given spirit that engenders as well as connects all things to one another, as the force of life and transformation set into motion by divine intention.
An Animá practice begins with awareness we can’t suppress, insights we can’t ignore, distraction and dishonor we can no longer tolerate, and a calling that won’t let us be. It involves self exploration, growth and actualization. Conscious interdependence, interpenetration and interaction. Expanding empathy and heightened sensation. Compassionate contact and reciprocal contracts with the inspirited land. Such a life could be called spiritual by those so inclined, but a spirituality that neither denigrates nor denies desirous existence. Life’s hungers, disappointments and pleasures are as catalysts accelerating our manifestation, transformation and growth. Animá – like life itself – is an assignment that we of necessity sign up for again and again, each and every moment anew, promises kept and the impeccable dance each of us do. It is love fully given, existence fully experienced… and our individual most meaningful purpose every day more fulfilled.
Awakening to the experience of being/belonging can be both transformative and blissful, a state of self-realization and intense mindfulness sometimes known as the shamanic state, “satori,” “samadhi” or “enlightenment.” Such states are not so much about transcending matter or flesh as about reimmersion in the depth and breadth of embodied reality: deep seeing, deep tasting and smelling, deeply dreaming…. touching and praising the universe through the world that is not “ours” but “us.” Contrary to what some traditions teach, enlightenment is neither forgetting the question nor figuring out all the answers. It is casting a light, not only on outward form but on the inner recesses of truth and being. It is the intense experience of conscious interpenetration, the wordless, timeless thrill of being propelled into realization, relationship and responsibility, challenge and delight! Enlightenment is not to make things easy or safe, nor to spare us any lesson or assignment. It exists to thrust us into the pulsing fabric of a rhythmic, patterned universe… and in this way, back into the fullest living of our spirit filled lives.
We are not, after all, the secular pilots of an unfeeling Spaceship-Earth, but rather, the blessed participants in the dance of embodied energies. Singers. Dreamers. Praise givers. As from a birthing hut we rise, forever changed and changing, revealed to be responsible celebrants of amazing life, agents of awakeness and caring, playmates of and vehicles for omnipresent spirit by whatever name we might choose to call it. Christians, Buddhists, Pagans, Agnostics or Eclectics… together we can help co-create the world, not as the pawns of fate but as ecstatic organs of a larger whole, as the willful extensions of the forever miraculous.
In this way, our drums and voices, too, become part of the mountains’ and canyon’s longtime telling, a song for all the future’s waiting ears.
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Categories: Jesse Wolf Hardin – Essays & Tales, Understanding & Practicing Animá
Jane
Oh, again–beautifully expressed. Yes, this post really sums “it”–everything–all up
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