Supporting the Sundance

"Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves" Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

This was my third year as a supporter at the Little Big Medicine Sundance. How I was called to connect with the LBM sundance was totally a story of following Spirit. A chiropractor/ homeopath friend of mine had received an invitation to support the LBM sundance by volunteering her services for the local Navajo community and for the sundancers. She was really clear that she needed to go and when I heard about it, something really spoke to me so I asked her to forward the email invite to me. I contacted the homeopath who was organizing the healing tent to find out whether they needed acupuncturists and was invited to come. By the time my friend decided that she was not going to the sundance I was already committed energetically and financially [I was really excited about going and had already booked off that time as vacation time and bought the plane ticket].

I however knew nothing about the Sundance ceremony. As I am part native I had been studying with an Anishnawbe elder who encouraged me to go to the Sundance but would tell me nothing more than that the ceremony involved 4 days of fasting, praying and dancing. "Go and find out for yourself if this is a ceremony, a medicine, that speaks to you." She said, "You will know if this ceremony or something like it belonged to your people, you will feel it." Having never been to Arizona and knowing no more than the little I can find on google about the sundance ceremony, I asked Karen, the healing tent organizer, for a contact person to talk to … I felt there was something very serious about the sundance and knew I needed to be properly prepared.

I spoke to Cheryl, a local naturopath who had been to the sundance the year before and she filled me in on a lot of the etiquette and suggested that I call her when I get to Albuquerque airport and if the timing worked out I could get a ride with her. The talk with Cheryl set my mind at ease in many ways but there I was, the night before getting on the plane for the Sundance feeling like I was jumping into the unknown, feeling sick to my stomach so much so that I called the airline to find out if I could change my departure date. Not without paying another $150 was the reply, so after throwing up all night, I packed in less than an hour, arrived at the airport an hour before the early morning flight was to leave and was on my way.

I knew that where I was going was very significant for my spiritual development as the Adversary was already putting up roadblocks, or who knows maybe it was the Great Spirit who had decided to test my resolve. Was I committed to the path that I had chosen? As it turned out I was. When I called her from the airport, Cheryl had already left the city and had arranged to make a few stops before heading to the sundance. That worked out well because my luggage, with my camping gear and acupuncture supplies, had been delayed and when it had not arrived 3 flights later I rented a car and went to tour downtown Albuquerque. When my luggage came in on the last flight of the evening it was too late to start my journey. I stayed overnight in Albuquerque and in the morning I went to the grocery store to stock up on supplies before heading off into the unknown.

I had been to PowWows, full moon ceremonies, sweat lodges, shaking tent ceremonies, sunrise ceremonies, solstice and equinox ceremonies, but somehow this felt different. I had been reading Douglas Adam’s book Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and had connected with the part where Dirk was following a lead and jumped on a plane not really knowing where it was going then gets in a cab at the other end and passes a sign that says ‘Gusty Winds May Exist’, so as I am driving along I-40 heading towards Arizona and I see the same sign and I immediately felt at ease. “Ah, a wink from the Great Spirit” I thought at the time. The passage from the book I had just recently read had manifested in my path to let me know I was indeed heading in the right direction – going where I needed to be.

Well, I arrived at the Sundance the first time after taking many wrong turns and driving half way across the Navajo reservation and back but when I arrived I was greeted by an older woman with a beautiful spirit who invited me to set up my camp in the area that she and her daughter and granddaughter were camping. She took me under her wing as though I was her own daughter. From that moment it felt like coming home and I knew why the Great Spirit had led me to this place at this time. I received many winks from the Great Spirit at that first Sundance and once the ceremony began I immediately connected with it. It felt as though my many years of martial arts training, meditation, fasting, praying and dancing had all brought me to that moment to be there supporting the sundancers both during the ceremony with my dance, as well as after the ceremony with the acupuncture, massage and other healing arts.

Last year I supported the Sundance again and felt that my connection was even stronger than the first year because as well as supporting in the ways I had the year before, during the dance, I really connected energetically with one of the sundancers, a man who I never met and knew almost nothing about, and felt that during the 4 days of the dance that my prayers were being taken directly to the Creator through him and his dance. It was a very powerful experience that awakened in me long forgotten memories of a time gone by -- maybe this sundancer was my energetic counterpart at some moment in time, who knows, but our purely energetic connection awakened memories of past lives, or maybe they were ancestral memories encoded in my DNA, who is to know but the experience and the dance were very powerful.

Again this year I returned to support the LBM Sundance and it’s beautiful vision of many little medicines coming together to make one big medicine that will be healing for all the individuals at the Sundance as well as for our families, our communities and for the entire planet. This year I was called upon to do more than I had in previous years, to help take care of a young child, so that her mother, a sundancer, could dance, to assist at Masauke’s altar when he and Linda were called away and to continue assisting with the healing work I had been doing in the past 2 years.

This year I was also called to take part in the ceremony at a deeper level, and received permission to dance the last day of the dance to give thanks to the Creator for all the wonderful blessings that had been bestowed upon me and to ask for my own healing and for the healing of all sentient beings. Being in the dance itself, even for such a short time, was extremely powerful, even more so because the energetic connection I had to the sundancer who is like my energetic double was re-established and once again he too served as a channel directing my prayers to the Creator.

To think that three years ago Sundance was a name that I only associated with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Spirit has really lead me a long long way and who knows where this path will end.

Staywell and Travel with Spirit in beauty and Truth, Spirit Traveller