Blue Deer Center in the Media

Malidoma Somé

Program Details:

Various changes in our world are a confirmation and a testimony that global transformation cannot happen without everyone in the world being willing and able to shed a plethora of unwanted calcifications. How do we address all the things that stop us from change, including the scars of loss and the cleansing of the graffiti that litters the wall of our psyches?

A Time To Grieve–A Time To Grow
September 25-27, 2009
Cost $470, includes program fee, gourmet meals and shared lodging.

Click here for complete program information, or call the Blue Deer Center at 845.586.3225.

Post Program Offering: Personal Divinations with Malidoma
Exact Dates and cost TBA

Experiencing a personal divination with Malidoma is a beautiful, empowering and healing manifestation of spirit. It is an opportunity to hear direction from the realm of the ancestors and to connect, more deeply, with what you know “in your bones”.

Malidoma utilizes cowry shell divination for his sessions. You will be asked to spread a pile of shells, bones, stones, and other implements on a special “divination cloth”. This spread is what Malidoma will read and interpret to bring a message about your life and purpose for being on the planet at this time. The message will also be about finding balance with the elemental spirits of earth, water, fire, nature and mineral.

On Grief– from Healing Wisdom of Africa

“We have described water as the second element in the cosmological wheel, a key element that at the beginning cooled the raging fires and brought stability, reorienting the cosmic energy toward producing continuity and community. Since then, people all over the world have felt the need to return again and again to water for purification, cleansing, reconciling, and making peace in the face of the onslaught of life’s challenges.

This means that to the indigenous, challenge or crisis is cosmologically and spiritually symptomatic of a rise in fire, When someone is in crisis, regardless of the nature of the crisis, that person is said to be returning to fire. The distress of the person drifting toward or into fire is a plea for the radically reconciling introduction of water. When there is no water around, we are vulnerable to crisis. People, especially people in crisis, are naturally attracted to water. Many recognize that when they are agitated about something in their lives, they find peace at the waterfront. Just the sight of a large body of water brings a feeling of quiet and peace, a feeling of home. Water resets a system gone dry in which motion is accelerated beyond what we can bear. African healing wisdom looks at physical illness as a fire moving a person’s energy beyond the limit of what he or she can bear. This suggests that we all need water, and need rituals of water, to stay balanced, oriented, and reconciled.

There are countless aspects of human experience that water rituals affect in a healing way. One of them, perhaps the most important, is the emotional self. Many people in the Western world walk around like time bombs, loaded with contradictory emotions that are often so hard to articulate that the individual is dangerous to himself and to his surroundings. Perhaps first among these emotions is grief. In this culture, the challenge of confronting overwhelming grief must be considered the most crucial task requiring the reconciling energy of water.

In indigenous Africa, one cannot conceive of a community that does not grieve. In my village, people cry every day. Until grief is restored in the West as the starting place where the modern man and woman might find peace, the culture will continue to abuse and ignore the power of water, and in turn will be fascinated with fire. Grief must be approached as a release of tension created by separation and disconnection from someone or something that matters. The average Western person is grieving about being isolated. Western men in particular are grieving about the dead they did not grieve properly because they were told that men don’t cry. In my work, I hear this everywhere. Grief is not only expressed in tears, but also in anger, rage, frustration, and sadness. An angry person is a person on the road to tears, the softer version of grief. Sadness and the feeling of heaviness within are symptomatic of a deep well of grief in the psychic underground.

One must ask why tears, the softest expression of grief, are not as acceptable in the modern world as are anger and rage. I say this because to inidgenous Africans emotions are sacred. To villages it looks as if the West is uncomfortable with tears because one cannot argue verbally, logically, against this kind of emotion. Villages also believe that Westerners are afraid of emotion because they are afraid of loss of control. Emotions have the tendency to spread from person to person, and therefore social control, to the Western mind, is being risked with any display of emotion.

Many Westerners are beginning to see that there is also danger in remaining stuck with rage, anger, and sadness; they are the directionless vehicles of a grief that remains hidden. When these emotions are not allowed a fluid catharsis, one is left in a state of incompleteness. The end of the domination of one’s life by such emotions requires an outpouring of liquid. You cannot truly grieve within and remain composed without. Emotion is an extroverted phenomenon, and it cannot find its much needed release if expressed only internally. Denied an outward expression, grief grows stronger and organizes itself like a hurricane that can rise up and sweep us away. I have heard many times express their fear of grief because they feel that if they even begin to release it, they will be overcome, eventually drowning in their own tears. Indeed, this is how it feels, but this is not what actually happens.

In my village, emotion is ritualized because it is seen as a sacred thing. If addressed within a sacred space, the emotions of grief can provide powerful relief and healing. Any time the feeling of loss arises, there is an energy that demands ritual in order to allow reconciliation and the return of peace. These are crises that water rituals can resolve. Water rituals help to shed the massive accumulation of negative motion due to loss, failure, and powerlessness. Each one of these problems heightens our awareness of the challenges of life. Loss and powerlessness are particularly humbling because they disrupt continuity and reveal our humanity. One of the things all humans have in common is loss. Be it the loss of loved ones or the loss of dreams, be it the loss of a job or a relationship. In all of these situations, water rituals are necessary.

In order to do a water ritual effectively, one needs a community. There are few personal water rituals, as the Dagara people don’t comprehend the idea of private grief. Grief is a community problem because the person who is sick belongs to the entire community. Just as a wound on your leg cannot be approached as the leg’s problem alone, but must be treated as a problem for the entire body, a person in a village who is sick with grief sickens the rest of the village.”

About Malidoma Somé:

Before his birth, in 1956, the elders of Malidoma’s village knew that his purpose in coming into this world was to carry the message of indigenous technology and spirituality to the western world, a place where modernity was growing increasingly hungry for a reconnection to ancient wisdom. Little did he know, as a young child, stolen from his family and village, that the years he would spend under the harsh tutelage of the religious order would prepare the way for the eventual challenge of integrating old and new, the sacred and the mundane. For more than twenty years, Malidoma Somé has shared the wisdom of his ancestors and tribal elders, awakening a deep knowing in the hearts and bones of those who have recognized in his name, his books, his voice, the spirit world inviting the renewal of a deep and abiding relationship with all beings
on earth.

Malidoma is the author of several books, including Ritual: Power, Healing and Community, Of Water and The Spirit, and The Healing Wisdom of Africa. He is currently working on two new books, one about the Ancestors (and our relationship with them), and another, a sequel to his highly esteemed autobiography, on the topic of Gatekeepers.

Dr. Somé is also an initiated elder in his village in Dano, Burkina Faso, W. Africa. He travels throughout the world bringing a message of hope, healing and reconciliation through the powerful tools of ritual and community building.