In last month’s issue, Malidoma Patrice Somé, a West African shaman of the Dagara lineage and author of three books, Of Water and the Spirit, The Ancient Wisdom of Africa and Ritual, shared the wisdom of his native culture. Here, he continues to share this wisdom with New Life Journal in regards to change and healing.

NLJ: You speak about a consciousness in nature. How can interacting with the elements of the natural world and this consciousness assist us in our personal healing?

MS: It is good to really understand that we are a part of the natural world, especially in the absence of working community. We are first a community with the trees, with the plant world and with the animal world. They always live in community; they don’t fight, and they’re not territorial. The way that they shed and then blossom and then go back to shedding and so on and so forth always constitutes a very good lesson for those of us who have trouble embracing change. One of the most important things for the development of our spirit will have to be in this area. Learn how to embrace change, not how to fight it, and not how to resist, but how to let it happen; because, in fact, this is what has contributed to survival.

Nature has survived that way, by embracing change like the element Water that has the capacity to flow. Water does not attack but always gets there with a very deceptive stubbornness…It is always motivated by the need to find the least resistant point to continue, as opposed to taking on a whole mountain and fighting with it…to get to the other side. So, there you are standing in the way. It might be easier to go around and around in order to find a much smoother way to get there. We often feel that we have to blast our way through, as if there is something glorious about that. People come to understand through cultural conditioning to be rigid, but that is countered by the vibration of our soul. In other words, we are conditioned in such a way that we want to find journey by the battle. We have to fight, whether we hide that behind other words such as “competition,” “consumption,” and so on and so forth; there is too much insistence on battle rather then just being. More often than not if you want to win something, just don’t invest anything. Shut down. All of a sudden, the other party will realize it’s boring to be around you and get out of there; all of a sudden the space is made available.

NLJ: You often speak about how each person has a true purpose, a task to complete in their lifetime. Can you elaborate on the ways in which we can align with our highest purpose?

MS: Alignment with purpose is always a daily work. You can’t put your alignment with purpose on automatic. I know that just as in all this radical initiatory ritual there is always a tendency to swerve away from purpose, so there is constant need for correction, like a ship that is missing course needs to be corrected constantly. So, my sense is that the most recommendable way for staying in tune with purpose is ritual. But what kind of ritual?

There are rituals that the individual can do and rituals that must be done with community. In a culture in which community is kind of iffy, I think that the burden is on the individual to figure out how to stay ritualistically attuned to one’s purpose… For example, the creation of sacred space in one’s living area, a corner somewhere that you set aside as the corner of the spirit; there are ways in which you can make prayers prior to your daily engagement, perhaps after coming back from a long day. Chances are, due to the fact that these prayers are inspired by the need to solicit the help of other worldly forces to walk with you throughout the day, some of these forces won’t walk with you knowing that you are not walking along the path of your purpose. These forces are more alert and conscious of your purpose than even yourself, because your consciousness of your purpose is not the same thing as your bone awareness of what you have to do. [Visit www.newlifejournal.com to read the portion of the interview in last month’s issue where Malidoma speaks about bone in the Dagara culture.] Spirit is able to read the journal written in your bones. So, ask spirit, whether it is ancestors or the trees or the mountains, whatever it is, to walk with you and to be with you throughout those moments when you feel like you are more on your own. That is not something that is too much to ask somebody to do, and it doesn’t take that much time to just go there and say these things before you leave. So, I’ve always found that it is reasonable homework to give to people so that person can be reasonably guarded throughout the week. For a person to be at least as close to purpose as possible, this is something that is completely necessary.

To read past interviews with Malidoma, visit www.newlifejournal.com.

Emily Sullivan is a licensed massage and bodywork therapist in Asheville, NC.  She can be reached at emilybodywork@gmail.com.

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